A part of me felt profound disappointment and disillusion while I sat behind the engineer, watching him pitch-correct and paste together my vocal takes. I reconciled it by reminding myself that the words were real, that the emotion behind them was authentic. But we didn’t need authentic sounds; this was audio CGI. We needed hits—songs that would get played on the radio and sell to a wide audience. This was what I wanted.
If it wasn’t for Butch, I wouldn’t have made it through the four-month session. Butch had become a constant in my life. When Heather came out to L.A., we rented an apartment blocks from his house, and he gave me a ride to and from the studio each day. He told me tales from his own band’s past. When a song by someone like Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins came on the radio, he regaled me with stories about recording them. Every tale was filled with trial and tribulation. He encouraged me to consider the lawsuit we were going through as par for the course of choosing a life of rock and roll. Just a rite of passage.
As Heather and I were getting settled into our new Los Angeles apartment, preparing the place for the baby, Butch brought his daughter’s old crib over for us to use. He passed it down to us as it had been passed down to him. He even helped me set it up. It was endearing watching this studio genius struggle to figure out how to put it back together, which screw went where. I couldn’t help but feel that it was a moment that should have been shared between a father and son, and I wondered how many moments like this I’d missed out on in life. I had a better relationship with my producer than I did with my own father.
8. HIGH PRESSURE LOW
The baby arrived on October 30, Devil’s Night, a girl—Evelyn Omneya Gabel. I remember the day well, as she has made me tell her the story many, many times before bed.
“Were you and Mommy at the sushi restaurant?”
Yes, we were eating at the sushi restaurant, right around the corner from our apartment in Silver Lake, when Mommy’s water broke. So we went back to our apartment and called our midwife, Mrs. Deborah Frank, and she came over and said, “Yep, the baby is coming, it’s time to go to the hospital!”
“And then you drove?”
Yes, so then I put Mommy, with you still inside of her, into the Prius and drove all the way across Los Angeles from Silver Lake to Santa Monica and checked into the hospital. We waited and waited for you to come, but after 27 hours you still wouldn’t come out. So the doctors told Mommy she was going to have to have a C-section and they cut you right out. I always knew you were going to be a little girl, but when I saw for sure, I shouted out, “IT’S A GIRL!!!”
The doctors brought you over to this little table under a bright light to keep you warm, and I came over and I said, “Hi, Evelyn, I’m your daddy, and I love you so much.” And you reached out just like this and grabbed hold of my pinky finger and I was so happy. Then the doctors handed me scissors and I cut your umbilical cord. They wrapped you up like a little burrito and handed you to me. I walked over to Mommy, holding you, and I said, “Evelyn, this is your mommy.” And you smiled a little smile. They finished sewing Mommy back up and brought her into another room. I carried you there and handed you to her and you were so hungry you went straight to latch onto her bey-boo, like this… “Nom, nom, nom, nom.”
For three days, our little family stayed there at the hospital. Mommy slept in a bed and you slept in a crib next to her and I slept on a couch. When it was time to leave, I put Mommy and you back into the Prius and drove all the way back across Los Angeles from Santa Monica to Silver Lake, back to our apartment, where you were finally home with us and we were a family.
My little girl Evelyn, always asleep before the end of the story.
This sounds like shit.”
That was what Tom Whalley, the head of Warner, told me upon first listen of the new album. Told me right to my face. Couldn’t have missed hearing it, not with my big ears. “Like shit.”
In the days after Evelyn was born, Butch had been busy mixing the album at a little studio in Atwater Village around the corner from our apartments. I’d stop by every day and listen to the progress. Whalley hated what Butch had done with it. He wanted it remixed, and threw $70,000 at us to hire someone else to do so. Fortunately, Butch is a professional and took it in stride. He’d made dozens of major label records, and had learned that this temperamental behavior came with the territory.
Realistically, the odds were very low that we could actually produce a hit. We were right at the end of the era where albums could still sell millions of copies, let alone rock bands, let alone some punk band from Florida. I knew all of this, but what could I do about it? I had to wake up every day and try to make the best of the situation I was in. The label chose the song “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” as the radio single and planned to make a music video for it. The song was our Hail Mary pass; it had to be a hit.
“Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?”
As much as the album’s setbacks and expectations were weighing on me, I couldn’t get my mind off of the possibility, no matter how unrealistic, of becoming a woman. It began to consume me. Late at night, after Heather and Evelyn would go to bed, I’d sit on the couch in the living room and watch videos on my computer, testimonials of people who were in various stages of gender transition. I knew how cold and callous this was, but when I saw these people, I judged their appearance and transition results in my head. “That person passes,” I’d think. “I don’t want to look like that person.” “I’d be fine looking like that person.” I even researched local psychiatrists that specialized in gender, although I never had the courage to do anything with the information. The idea of opening up to anyone filled me with dread.
Moving to Los Angeles meant that I’d have to travel back to Gainesville, where the rest of the band was, for weeks of practices between tours, with Heather and the baby remaining behind. I stayed at hotels in the area, and couldn’t wait to get done with practice so I could rush back to my room and be her. I became more and more brazen, the longer I stayed. I developed a system. I requested a room on the ground level with a balcony door so that I could walk out to my van in the parking lot. I could leave the door open to not worry about being locked out of my room with a demagnetized hotel key card in full femme. I kept a change of boy clothes in the van, just in case.
At first, I walked only as far as the soda machine down the hall and back. When I pulled the door closed behind me, I heard the lock click shut, and my heart beat out of my chest. Every second spent waiting for the can of soda to drop felt like hours. Emboldened by the success of soda capers, I then walked outside to the van and back in a dress, heels, makeup, and wig. I ventured a bit farther outside my comfort zone each night until I was driving around town, usually ending up at the rehearsal space after hours when I knew no one would be there. I took great care to avoid people. I checked both ways before entering hallways, making sure the coast was clear in either direction before making my move. But when a door opened behind me, I sped up until I could turn a corner and hide. These close calls terrified me.
November 9, 2009—Los Angeles, CA
Another birthday comes and goes. Twenty-nine years old. Who fucking cares? Heather made me blow out a candle before she went to bed. It wasn’t on a cake. It was one of the emergency earthquake candles I’d bought. She just said it was proper that I should blow out a candle and make a wish on my birthday. I wished that in a year from now, I wouldn’t feel the same way as I do now. It’s futile, it really is.
I’ve realized that even when this lawsuit is over, win or lose, I have been broken. I have not walked or crawled through any of this, I have been dragged. I feel like a failure, a total fucking failure.
Knowing that there’s a bottle of 40 Vicodin in the bathroom drawer is not good for me. I have no self-control. I just swallowed my second of the night. I want to swallow all of them. Good times.
Two-hour-long conference call with the lawsuit lawyer. Warren has his hand cupped over the phone receive
r and is talking to people in the background the whole time. I’m pretty sure he was taking orders at his restaurant and doing the dishes at one point. What a fuck. That phone call cost thousands of dollars.
Is suicide an option? Would my everlasting soul be damned for taking my life with my own hands, for the sin of running away from it all? Somehow suicide seems doesn’t seem as cowardly as existing right now does. It’s more like just clearing the slate. I could be wrong though. Best to not risk the chance.
December 2, 2009—Flight DL1720
It’s unrealistic to think that I can go on living this way. I’m completely unhappy. The way I feel inside is never going to change. This is how I felt when I was six years old, when I was 14 years old, and this is how I feel now at 29 years old. Why wouldn’t I continue to feel this way for the rest of my life? A successful career doesn’t change it. Marriage doesn’t change it. Having a kid doesn’t change it.
How do I reconcile the person I am now with the person I want to be? How would the people in my life handle such a drastic change and how would it change our relationships? My wife? My mother? My friends? The producer? The record label? Our audience? How would making a change like this affect my daughter’s life? So many unknowns and so many terrifying possibilities.
How would making this choice change me psychologically? Would gender liberation bring me out of depression? Would I no longer rely on drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism? Would I still be able to work as a musician?
What if I made this decision, announced it to all my friends and family and the rest of the world, and then I realized it wasn’t really what I wanted and that I was none the happier for it?
Would I ever be attractive? Pretty, even?
December 29, 2009—Silver Lake, CA
I am incapable of being honest with myself or anyone else. I hate my life. It doesn’t have to do with Heather. It doesn’t have anything to do with the pressures of being married and having a kid. It doesn’t have anything to do with currently being sued for a million dollars. It doesn’t have to do with anything but what’s going on inside of my head. I am suffering from gender dysphoria.
I didn’t enter into my marriage or the decision to have a child having fully realized any of this. I thought the dysphoria was behind me. It was only this past year that I came to the full realization. I think sometimes now about running away and starting a new life somewhere alone. I know I could never abandon Evelyn though and I don’t want to lose Heather.
I now fantasize constantly about coming out and being honest about the way I feel and really am with everyone I know. I wish I was brave enough to do that. I know if I were to choose to transition that I would lose most of the people in my life, if not all of them. But if this is a decision I’m serious about making, then now is the time, while I’m still young and while my daughter is still young.
Will I ever pass?
Not long after we completed the album at the end of the year, Andrew and Verité announced that they were soon to be joining Heather and me as new parents. The supportive side of me—the side that was a good friend, ecstatic about their news—was gone. Instead, the bandleader side of me—the side that put our careers first—started doing the math. If Verité was three months pregnant, and had six months left to go, that would put her due date in the early summer, right when our new album was scheduled for release. While I feigned excitement and offered them congratulations, in my mind, I saw my battleship sunk. Their pregnancy was an inconvenience. Selfish, even. They hadn’t thought ahead like Heather and I had.
The promotional effort and the group solidarity needed to successfully launch an album would be impossible now. We would need to be firing on all cylinders, and it looked like we were down half of them. I would have to find a fill-in bass player, as Andrew would definitely need time off. Not only was this our first album with a new drummer, but we’d now have some faceless bassist up there on stage. Would fans even recognize this band anymore? Would I?
It was waiting for me every morning when I opened my eyes. A tattoo across my wrist: “Ramblin’ Boys of Pleasure,” the title of a song by my friend Brendan Kelly, which had been lifted from a Pogues song. He and I had gotten matching tattoos of the phrase one night years ago when we were drunk on tour in Dallas with his band, the Lawrence Arms. I don’t even remember getting it, just waking up hungover in a hotel bed in Austin next to Brendan, both of us wearing plastic wrap around our new markings. My arms and legs had collected plenty of bad tour tattoos over the years by then. Some I regretted and had covered with thick black bands, but none as much as this one. I saw the word staring back at me every time I looked down, a reminder of the person I never truly felt I was: BOYS.
I woke up one morning and made the decision—I wanted it gone, off my body forever. Whether I realized it or not, this was my first step; the start of my acceptance that I was going to transition into a woman.
9. BAMBOO BONES
Andrew was visibly shaken throughout our whole show in Boston, his fingers trembling as they plucked at his bass. Just minutes before we took the stage, he got the call that Verité was going in for an emergency delivery, at more than two months early.
“What do I do?” he asked me after hanging up the phone. I didn’t know what to say.
I could see the panic in his eyes, but like a champ, he powered through the set and then immediately hopped the first plane back to Gainesville.
A fill-in player flew out from Portland in time for the next day’s show, a stranger never to be seen again after his duty was fulfilled, but the bus broke down and we had to cancel anyway. I wasn’t surprised. Nothing fazed me anymore. Of course the bus broke down, of course the baby came early. This tour was just one more calamity in another disastrous album launch for Against Me!.
I had titled the album White Crosses as my homage to Florida and the amphetamines that fueled the writing of it. Lacking the time to put together another cut-and-paste creation of my own, I submitted a “melter” image commissioned from the graphic design artist Steak Mtn. It was a vintage erotica portrait, the subject’s face and body dripping away into the scene. The gender identity of the nude model was mangled, blurring into a black and white mélange of flesh and tits. I saw myself in the image, a self-portrait of sorts, a Frankenstein’s monster of compartmentalizations.
Unsurprisingly, not only did the label “not get it,” they outright hated it. They hammered us for the most arbitrary changes, flower pots in the background taken out or a foreground lamp altered slightly, trying to sway my mind into choosing a new direction. I insisted and tried to take the criticism in stride. I was trying to be receptive to any idea thrown my way on this album by the label, the producer, the engineer, or the manager, but I had a vision, too.
White Crosses was our second major label album to leak before its release date. The label had again scurried to accommodate the blunder, but it was futile. We never found out who leaked it, although everyone, including our own manager, pointed their fingers at me.
“I Was a Teenage Anarchist” was getting radio play, though, which I was told was a big deal. KROQ in L.A. put it in rotation, and it was in the top five in commercial radio in Canada. Good for the song, I thought. I was happy for it, but I didn’t feel any ownership over it anymore. It wasn’t mine, having been stripped from me by all the compromises I’d made with the team of people working on it. We filmed a video for it on the Venice Beach boardwalk. In one, unbroken slow-mo scene, it depicted several cops beating the shit out of me with nightsticks in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers, as my tribute to the abuse I’d suffered as a teenager at the hands of the Collier County sheriff’s office.
“I was a teenage anarchist, but then the scene got too rigid. It was a mob mentality, they set their rifle sights on me. Narrow visions of autonomy, you want me to surrender my identity. I was a teenage anarchist, the revolution was a lie!”
Punks hated the song. They took it as an affront, like I had gotten too famous to be bother
ed with anarchist politics. We’d play it on tour and there would always be two dickheads in the front row giving us the finger through the entire three and a half minutes.
We had played the song on The Tonight Show and left feeling defeated. Due to a camera malfunction, we were asked to play it a second time. I realized the second take wasn’t as good, and when the manager made me watch a side-by-side comparison of the two in the monitor, I could tell how disappointed he was. He pushed the producers to use the first take despite whatever they felt had gone wrong, but they refused. Jay Leno introduced us by calling us one of the best punk rock bands ever. He shook our hands afterward and said, “Nice job, gentlemen,” and my skin crawled just a little bit. The only consolation was giving a White Crosses CD to the show’s main guest, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and watching him drive off the Burbank lot in his huge SUV with the windows down, blasting “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” and nodding along.
I had spent the entire release day for the album high as a kite on blow. I woke up in a New York City hotel room and started doing rails off the nightstand first thing in the morning, then went on a verbal attack against a journalist at Alternative Press, one of the most historically supportive magazines for us. It ended with me telling him to go fuck himself. It felt purposeful. The magazine was notorious for touching up the musicians on their covers, and I was sick of being forever molded into this frontman I was not. Yet whenever the offer to be on the cover had been extended over the years, a publicist or manager would pressure me into doing it. I figured if I burned that bridge, and I mean really torched it, I’d never be asked to have my fucking photo taken again.
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