Pope’s brother spoke too. I felt bad for him beyond the obvious reasons of loss. Pope never spoke kindly of his brother, their relationship was strained. I’m sure all of Pope’s friends were given the same impression. Pope’s brother must have been able to sense that from the room. Regardless of anything though they were brothers and doesn’t that mean something? Shouldn’t death forgive?
I thought of my own brother, whom I am also distant from and the way I would feel in attendance at his funeral surrounded by his current friends. I wouldn’t know any of them but they would probably all have an impression of me, an opinion based on whatever my brother had told them. What would that be?
There was a photo montage shown, pictures of Pope throughout his life projected onto a screen. Pope as an infant. Pope as a child. Pope as a teenager. Pope as a husband. Pope as a friend. Pope at work as a lighting director. He had a true gift as an LD, a total savant, a da Vinci. I had seen some of the pictures before, I was in a couple of them too.
For the finale to the service, the lights were turned off in the room. Fog machines shot off and filled the room with haze as a light show was projected onto Pope’s open casket and Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People” was blasted at stun volume. It was perfect. Pope would have loved it.
When the song ended, everyone lined up to say a final goodbye to Pope’s face. Heather was crying uncontrollably. Her lack of composure kept mine intact. In the parking lot outside of the funeral home everyone drank and smoked. I went in to give Jay a hug and I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t want me to hug him while smoking a cigarette. He didn’t want me to get ash on his expensive tailored suit. It was a telling sign of character that I’ll never forget or forgive.
I had never been part of a funeral procession before. I can only imagine how funny Pope would have thought it was that two Oklahoma Highway Patrol Officers were giving him an escort through the city, letting him blow through every red light.
Pope’s family had arranged for a preacher to give a graveside sermon. Pope would have hated it. The preacher didn’t know Pope and his speculation about the type of person Pope was came off as insulting.
We all watched Pope’s coffin as it was lowered into the ground. Flowers, cigarettes, and joints were all thrown on top of it before a backhoe and four gravediggers covered him up forever.
It was then that I understood the finality of death, as all of Pope’s friends walked their separate directions away from the freshly buried grave. I wondered if Pope was crying out for everyone not to leave, please stay, please stay. Please, stay.
I thought about the absolute darkness surrounding Pope, the complete and total darkness that I am not yet ready to know.
April 26, 2011—Gainesville, FL
It’s a manic episode. I’m prisoner until the ride’s over. I offer little to no resistance.
Shopping for women’s clothes is emotionally exhausting. How many stores did I go to today?
I’m looking for the most ideal shopping situation, an empty store with no one watching. There’s always a certain amount of embarrassment involved in the transaction. I can always feel the cashier’s judgment.
I’m never able to fully think through what I’m about to buy. I’m too worried someone I know will see me. Trying on clothes is not an option. So I end up hating everything I buy or it just doesn’t fit. I’ve been thinking about getting a P.O. Box for shipping. I would need a debit card or credit card not linked to my joint bank account with my wife so I wouldn’t have to explain the charges on our bank statement to her.
I don’t like hiding things.
I don’t like feeling like I’m having an affair.
I hope someday to be able to share this side of me with Heather and have her accept it, but I’m not ready yet.
I’ve never stayed at this motel before. It is a true shithole but it’s cheap.
I bought women’s clothes at Sears today. How embarrassing is it to be a closeted transsexual buying women’s clothes at Sears?
It’s safe though, no one will see me there. Who the fuck shops at Sears?
The cashier, a frumpy middle aged woman, was breathing through her mouth with her nose closed while she rang me up so she wouldn’t catch my sick.
She seemed afraid of the clothes, only touching them with the very tips of her fingers.
No questions asked though, there are usually questions.
The whole exchange is silent.
Not a word spoken between us.
The whole time I think about Pope, and how he never cared what anyone thought of him. I think about how short life is and how there’s nothing wrong with being a freak. Rough surf on the coast today, wish I could have spent the whole day alone with you.
Will I ever pass? I don’t really care anymore.
In the summer of 2011, Against Me! got booked on a tour opening for Blink-182 and Rancid. Even though I was in my 30s, being around Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen made me feel like a punk teenager all over again. Every time I saw their faces, I thought back to that night I first saw them on MTV in Naples—a place I never thought I’d get out of—and how surreal it was that I was now sharing a stage with them.
August 26, 2011—4:22 PM
Blink-182 all have separate dressing rooms. There are signs backstage instructing crew and security under no circumstances to stop them, talk to them, or look at them in general. Rancid’s dressing room is right next door to ours, and they have a much more open vibe. I’ve become fast friends with Lars, despite my being intimidated, as he was one of my idols when I was young. Rancid was my favorite band when I was 14. Lars is approachable and easy to talk to. He also seems to speak with irony and sarcasm, the language I know best.
I saw him sitting on the couch in his room and called him over to come play some Swingin’ Utters songs on guitars with me. Lars produced their debut album, Streets Of San Francisco, a favorite of mine. Lars couldn’t remember any of the songs, so we started playing Rancid songs instead. I was on bass, Lars on guitar. We played “Hyena” together, a song my first punk band covered hundreds if not thousands of times. Tim walked into the room and I started shaking, I was so nervous. I lost the strength in my fingers to even hold down the strings. Still, Tim said he was impressed.
“It’s all in the wrist.”
I’m still too in awe of Tim Armstrong to say anything directly to him. It’s so incredible to be on tour with them.
Some jerk threw a drink on me while I was watching Blink-182 play from the audience. He approached me as a fan of my band. We shook hands and then he started leaning in too close, spitting in my face about how much he hated Blink-182, and how he couldn’t believe we were on this tour. He only came for Rancid and us.
I told him politely that I respected his opinion, but I liked Blink-182 and just wanted to watch the show. He looked at me, offended, and then dumped his drink on my head. I chased after him, pissed off, tried to get security to do something. Andrew and James got in the middle of us before a fight could happen. Security escorted him out of the arena as he was threatening to stab me.
I know that if it would have been me who threw the drink and started shoving people, I would have been arrested for assault and possibly sued. Frustrating that incidents like this make me regret going out into the audience to watch the show. It’s less hassle to just hang out backstage and not see anything.
We signed our paperwork, effectively ending our deal with Sire Records and bringing an official close to the end of our five-year major label experiment that came within an inch of killing us. There was an offer on the table from Epitaph Records for our next album, and another offer to sign a distribution deal with RED, giving us the ability to start our own label. My pride was steering me away from Epitaph. It was a reliable independent punk label, famous for releasing albums by bands like Rancid and NOFX, but I worried that it was where the major label rejects went to die.
It was a risk, but we signed the distribution deal, giving us the
capability and capital to start a record label, which I called Total Treble. If we failed, at least it would be on us. But if we succeeded, then we’d be successful on our own terms. And most important to me, I would own the masters of whatever we produced. Not only did I want to release this next album, I wanted to record it, too. For two albums I’d learned what it was like to make concessions to labels, managers, and lawyers. Now was my chance to make up for it. I wanted full control.
I was also paying homage to Butch. After everything he taught me, I wanted the chance to apply his recording theories and test my own. The records we made together were the closest I’d get to going to college. Now I’d graduated, and I was on my own.
I had already started writing some songs for a new album and had been slowly sharing bits of them with the band. They were all centered around the idea of transitioning. It wasn’t what I set out to write, but gender was all I could think about, the dream of transitioning.
With the money from the RED deal, I rented an old abandoned post office I planned on converting into a studio on State Road 207 in Elkton, Florida, which is nowhere, just a curve in the road on my drive between Saint Augustine and Gainesville. I had struggled to find a suitable spot, a standalone brick building where I could be as loud as I wanted. The second I saw the post office, I knew it had the magic. I signed a rental lease for $500 a month right on the spot.
“What is it you do again?” asked the suspicious woman renting the building.
“I’m an artist.”
The studio needed work. The mildew-ridden blue industrial carpet was a stained mess, and would have to be torn up and replaced with laminate wood flooring. Ceiling tiles and insulation would have to be replaced; walls would need to be built to create a separate control room and live room. Once I realized the place would require more renovations than I could handle myself, I did something a bit underhanded. I called both my brother and my father to ask if they would come down and help me with the work. The two hadn’t spoken in half a decade, following their falling-out. Neither of them knew the other would be coming to the studio.
It was awkward at first, but it’s amazing how fast beer can mend things among the Gabel boys.
“Here, Mark, you want a beer?” my dad asked, offering over a can of Miller Lite.
“No, I’m good,” my brother responded coldly, turning his six-foot-six frame away from our father, focusing on organizing his toolbox.
I could sense how fast this whole setup was going south, so I quickly broke the tense silence. “I’ll have a beer, Dad! Hell, I’ll have two!”
Once I was halfway through chugging down a cold one, my brother softened and accepted a beer, too. My dad just wanted to share a beer with his two sons, and I wanted to give that to him. All I wanted was to share a beer with my dad and brother.
It felt good to kill two birds with one stone—getting my studio in shape and mending things between my father and brother. But there was a hidden agenda behind it for me. As I felt my desire to transition grow stronger, I was starting to see it as inevitable. I didn’t know how either of them would take it, or what it would do to my respective relationships with them. As we hammered away at drywall, collecting sawdust and paint on our Carhartts and finishing off a case of beer, I knew in my heart that this would be the last time the three of us would ever be together as men, the way fathers and sons are.
It was just before midnight on the last day of 2011. We were between songs onstage in Atlanta, Georgia. There was that familiar December 31 air of anticipation in the room, with the crowd eagerly waiting to christen a fresh year. I was as eager as they were. It felt like an official ending to a chapter for me.
I checked the time. 11:59 PM. “Fuck it,” I mouthed to myself, and charged the microphone stand.
“Will you guys indulge me for a second?” I asked the room to a smattering of drunken applause. “I just want to end the year in a really fucking selfish way.” I ran my fingers through my sweaty hair, which had grown down past my ears over the last few months. “If you’ve got to start counting, go ahead and start counting,” I told them. “I’m just gonna play a new song real quick.”
The faces before me looked confused as to what I was about to do. Not even the rest of the band knew what I was doing. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t for anyone else but me. I started to strum the opening chords to what would become the final track on the album I was writing, which I planned on titling Transgender Dysphoria Blues. “This song is called ‘Black Me Out,’” I told them.
It was just me and my guitar, exorcising the demons of years past. As I finished the first verse, the room erupted. People cheered and whistled, confetti trickled down, Andrew and James popped bottles of champagne behind me and passed them around the front row. I smiled and kept playing, shouting the words to compete with the volume of the celebration, and pretending the energy was for me.
“I don’t want to see the world that way anymore, I don’t want to feel that weak and insecure. As if you were my fucking pimp, as if I was your fucking whore. Black me out.”
For another two minutes, I clenched my eyes shut and powered through this song no one had ever heard, and to which no one could sing along. Couples continued to kiss, as though I was serenading them with a three-chorded “Auld Lang Syne.” For them, it was background music for their toasts to another year gone by. I was toasting, too. It was a farewell song. This was the night I said goodbye to Thomas James Gabel.
11. BLACK ME OUT
Our house in Saint Augustine sat where the Tolomato River meets the Atlantic Ocean. The kitchen looked out onto sprawling acres of marsh. The Florida air was always humid with salt. In the distance was the Fountain of Youth, the site where Ponce de León was said to have landed in 1513. The fountain was really just a spring coming up from the aquifer beneath the soil. What the Spanish explorer once thought to be the key to eternal life was now the water that locals drank, showered, pissed, and shit in. I’d spent the last couple of years looking out the windows of Butch’s hillside home in Silver Lake, onto a Los Angeles I could not conquer. But this was a view I could finally call my own.
It was February 2, a week before Heather’s 35th birthday, when she was looking despairingly onto all of this from our back porch. We had spent the morning arguing. She missed California and resented being back among the Bible-thumpers of Saint Augustine, feeling alone and isolated while I was out on tour. With a penchant for dark makeup and black clothes, she stuck out in town among the pickup trucks, Chick-fil-A restaurants, and lawn signs that read GOD HATES FAGS. Some neighbors believed her to be a Satan worshipper.
I figured this was as good a time as any. “Can we talk?” I asked. She nodded, sensing the weight of the request in my voice. I grabbed her by the hand and led her into our bedroom. We both lay on the bed on our sides, facing each other for a while, saying nothing. “I have to tell you something,” I finally said. She looked back into my eyes, waiting and nervous. It was so quiet that I could hear her breathing. I held her tightly against my body until I worked up the courage to let it out.
“I’m a transsexual.”
The proclamation hung there for a moment, and then crashed to a surreal adrenaline euphoria. I had sampled every barbiturate and narcotic from A to Z in my lifetime, but this was a high I’d never felt before. With three simple words, the levee had finally broken and everything held behind it could never be contained again. Emotions pouring out, I surrendered to being swept away in the current’s flow.
“I thought you were going to tell me you were having an affair,” she said with a smile. And in a way, I was. I was sneaking off to seedy hotel rooms to be with another woman. Bras and dresses were scattered on the floor next to my bed on tour. I had been keeping secrets and created a level of dishonesty in my marriage.
Before we could really discuss it further, I heard a voice from the hallway call to me. “Daddy?” Evelyn had woken up from her nap and came charging into the room to break up our conversation.
&nbs
p; Later in the day, while Heather and I were making the bed and talking about the chores we needed to get through the next morning, she used a male pronoun in regard to me. “Well that’s gonna be weird, huh?” I said. “Not saying ‘he’ for me anymore.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean I want to transition. I want to become a woman… fully.”
She paused and fell silent. I think the revelation that I was a transsexual truly hit her in this moment. She slowly started to comprehend that this didn’t mean I’d simply be cross-dressing around the house. It started to hit me, too. I wanted to transition genders, and there was a lot more to that than just hormones and surgery. Neither of us fully understood what it meant yet, or where to start.
The next day Andrew and James met me at the studio to talk about plans around the album and the future of the band. Jordan came, too, as he was again filling in as our manager. Until then, I’d been telling them that I was writing a concept album about a transsexual prostitute—the metaphor behind the feeling of having whored myself out to a record label was thinly transparent since James, Andrew, and I were all processing our own post-traumatic stress disorder from the past couple years of music industry hell. Previously, I’d been able to sneak a few subtle metaphors about my dysphoria in here and there. But an album focused entirely on it? I didn’t know how to explain that, and the new songs were not sticking with the guys.
James could make out a few lyrics to the title track through his in-ear monitors: “You want them to see you like they see every other girl / But they just see a faggot.”
“Hey, man,” he said between takes. “Are you saying ‘faggot’ on this song? It sounds like you’re saying it a lot. Are people gonna be cool with that?”
I realized that the reason the words weren’t connecting with them was that they didn’t have the context. So I came out with it. I didn’t mean to, I just wanted them to understand. I couldn’t hold back the momentum of the day before. Once the truth was spoken, it could be contained no longer.
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