Then, after you have felt very smart and insightful for a long time, you start to realize that all your insights are kind of stupid. For one thing, when you were supposed to be a boy, you weren’t, really. You learned how to act that part, the way your culture taught you (and it was pretty easy), but your heart wasn’t really in it. There was an undertone of mopiness to your performance and experience of boy which isn’t really there for most boys who aren’t trans. Then, you figure out that when you first started spending more time with women in a non-sexual way, they weren’t treating you like a boy, and they were letting you in kind of similarly to how they normally let other women in, but you were this effusive, messy, uncertain person of indeterminate gender who was prone to freaking out and having breakdowns over things like, say, boys giving flowers to your friends but not to you.
And then, when you dated that boy those two disastrous times, he knew that you were trans, and you will never know whether that informed the way he treated you, which means that for sure you were a lot closer to a heteronormative girl-boy relationship than you’d ever been in, but how are you going to relate that to anybody else’s experience?
Then you started dating dykes and found out how different it was to be a girl who dates girls than it was to be a boy who dates girls, but you could never really separate out whether it was because the girls you were dating now were different from the girls you had dated previously, or whether it was because dykes were somehow fundamentally different to date from straight girls, and then further: really? You dated one boy so you’re going to talk about what it’s like to date all boys? On top of which, you dated what, three, maybe four girls before you transitioned? And they were all pretty different from each other, had different issues, different ways of dealing with relationship stress, and now you’re going to generalize about all women?
On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out. You thought you were into it, you definitely liked the orgasms. It’s not like you had any reason you knew about to be mad at your junk, but jacking off was always way easier and less stressful than actually getting and maintaining an erection when somebody else was there. And further, you didn’t even know you were dissociating during sex until you’d been doing it for about a decade. You’d heard about dissociation a lot of times, and then you finally put together that, actually, that’s what it was when you had to stop paying attention to the person you were fucking so that you could fantasize about any number of situations that didn’t have anything to do with having a penis and fucking somebody with it. So you have no idea what it’s like to have a loving relationship with fun sex in it, which you assume everybody else has. Although really how are you gonna know?
And those are just the relationship aspects of gender. What about the way you get treated by old men working in stores? Young women? Do you think being tall, thin, and white has anything to do with the way you’re treated now? Do you think being thin, dressing okay, and being white had anything to do with it before you transitioned? There are so many variables that it’s like, you see all the constructions, all the connections, and you kind of understand them, but if you ever plan on trying to make sense of them, you’d better be doing it in a cave on a mountain someplace far away from other people, where you can eat lichens and drink from a shallow mountain spring and meditate eight hours a day—because it is very complicated.
But still, Maria is like, I’m supposed to have some kind of insight? Here is my insight: gender is stupid and annoying and I don’t want to talk about it any more ever. And if somebody is super-stoked to use me as an example of how gender isn’t real, or if anybody ever wants to talk to me about how my body is an example of genderqueerness at its most integrally crucial, or if anybody wants to tell me that they are through with their first year at a women’s college and that they represent the End of Gender, then that person can fuck off. Kate Bornstein was right when she said none of this gender stuff is real, but she didn’t go far enough. All of this gender stuff is stupid and it’s so complicated that it’s impossible to make sense of.
A tall, fiftyish gentleman type wanders into the Irish history section, all but bumps into her, then takes off his hat and bows subtly but dramatically. His clothes are clearly expensive.
Pardon me, my lady, he says in this Upper East Side drawl or something.
Of course, Maria says.
He looks at the shelves for a second, then seems to catch himself. He turns to her and he says, Forgive me for saying so, but you are beautiful.
Aww, thank you, she says, suddenly playing the sweet het girl.
Have you read all of these books?
He is being playful. Ugh. She mumbles a no and turns away, still smiling because what else are you going to do, explain patriarchy to this fucking rando?
He turns to look at the books again, and she start to walk around the corner, just so she doesn’t have to awkwardly interact with this middle-aged suitor, but he stops her with his voice.
I’m sorry, but may I ask you a question?
Of course, she says.
Would you join me for lunch this afternoon?
No thanks, she says. I have a boyfriend.
Then she pretty much runs away.
Obviously she should have told him she was gay. And that he was too old for her. She should have said a bunch of things, but one, she has frustratingly internalized the social code that says younger women must not be rude to older men, and two, disclosing that she’s gay always feels like it’s necessarily going to lead to the person figuring out that she’s trans, and not only does that feel scary and kind of dangerous, but it feels like they also might want to ask whether she’s really gay, if someone who is Really A Man and dates women isn’t just some fuckin creepy dude. Part of transitioning is trial-and-erroring your way through the social interactions that most women trial-and-error their ways through around puberty, learning just how to make a rando who’s hitting on you go away without getting mad. But when you’re twenty-nine and you haven’t learned this stuff, it feels impossibly mortifying.
So it’s actually way easier just to humor these men who grew up watching movies where the girl doesn’t like the hero until he’s been persistent enough to make her like him. This is the grease that keeps the gears of the heteronormativity machine spinning, obviously, but it’s just easier to slip out of an awkward situation with an awkward guy than it is to call out the misogyny inherent in what he’s doing. It’s a tough spot to be in, but also, this is coming from an angry dyke who’s also trans and who, at one point, had society try to use her as a vessel for that kind of misogyny. So.
It’s irresponsible just to propagate that, but also, what tools do you have to dismantle it? Male privilege sucks and is weird and the fact that it exists, that you’ve even had the experience of people trying to give it to you and, to some degree, have internalized it, complicates the decision to be totally irresponsible. Like, if you’re irresponsible, doesn’t that just give people like Johnny Upper East Side something to take advantage of? Or do you just do irresponsible within boundaries, so fuckers don’t end up figuring out you’re trans? That doesn’t feel like irresponsibility any more, it feels like contained rebellion, which is as productive as bringing a skateboard into the mall or wearing Chucks to church. A t-shirt with a cuss word on it.
On the other side of the store from the Irish history section Maria starts doing mental calculations about how to fit the word Irresponsible across her knuckles. IRSP NSBL? Maybe. That looks kind of stupid though.
Now that she feels weird and afraid to go hide in the secret Irish history cave, Maria decides to leave the store again. She’s walking, who knows, somewhere, and it’s pouring, so she’s trying mostly to walk under awnings. She still gets soaked, but whatever.
It’s not really problematic if your irresponsibility doesn’t affect anybody else. As long as this newfound freedom expresses itself as doing stuff that doesn’t
hurt anybody else, doesn’t make anybody else feel awkward or oppress them, it’s probably fine. There are Adderalls in her purse. Under the awning of the Halloween store she takes two.
NOFU TURE would fit across her knuckles. That’s kind of the right idea, but the Sex Pistols? Also totally unproductive teenage rebellion, the t-shirt with the cuss word on it again. The problem is, how do you have some kind of emotional catharsis when you know you’re too old for it? The trick, of course, is rejecting the poisonous, normative idea that there is a Too Old For Catharsis. Or, really, a Too Old For Anything. But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting normative ideas about gender.
Now she’s six blocks away from the store and since she’s just going for a walk to clear her head, she turns, walks another block, and then heads back.
She is soaked when she gets back in and Thomas McNealy, the manager, is waiting for her. He is a dick. He’s got to be in his mid-fifties, he’s got a wife and a kid, and he’s been working at this store forever. He is the gruff grownup, the one who tells you that you’re fired or that you’re on probation or whatever. He seems to like his job, too, like he’s been stuck here while the bohemian dreams of his youth burned down to a nine-to-five at a shitty bookstore and he wants to take it out on somebody.
Where have you been? he asks.
I went to get a bagel, she says dumbly.
Where is it?
I ate it.
You ate the whole bagel, he says. Did you get permission from a manager to go?
She thinks about lying and then admits that she didn’t.
Maria, he says, making sure to draw out her name in a way that makes it clear he remembers it wasn’t always her name, You have been late almost every day for months, and now you are just leaving without permission. Please clock out.
25.
And that’s that. You could be melodramatic and say: just like that Maria Griffiths is homeless and unemployed in New York City. The reality though is that she has a bunch of places to crash, so it would be appropriative to call herself homeless.
Okay, she says, great! I’m just gonna grab my stuff from the back, and I’ll be on my way!
All cheerful.
Someone will bring you your things, McNealy says.
Haha, you’re really not going to let me go back to the closet to get my bag?
You don’t work here any more, he says, looking off to one side, already bored with this conversation.
Some new kid brings her bag up. They must have watched her leave and prepared for this. Awkward, but whatever. Once again her response surprises her: she’s kind of excited. She laughs in the old fucker’s face, takes her bag, and walks back into the rain. She practically knocks over the terrifying owner of the store who’s just arrived in a cab or a car service or whatever. Right on time for work at noon.
Oh, she says, looking all disdainfully at Maria. This woman hates all of her employees. That sounds like a petulant thing to say, but really, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone at the store who can remember her ever saying anything nice to any of them. She sure doesn’t seem to care about books. Who knows why she continues to be involved with this store, unless it is like a next-level capitalist appropriation of and capitalization on the work done by the oppressed, in the same way that the kids in Brooklyn are appropriating its history, in the same way that the kids with Macbooks in coffee shops on the Lower East Side are soaking up and erasing Keith Haring and the Ramones. And this woman always seems miserable. When Maria was presenting as a boy, she was indifferent-to-mean; then, when she started presenting more queerly, she became a target. She would single Maria out whenever they were in eyesight of each other. Don’t you have something else you could be doing? she’d ask, or Will you please rearrange these books that don’t need it for no reason except that I want to tell you what to do? It was almost like a Mary Gaitskill kind of sadism, except that Maria didn’t see her often enough for there to be much of a narrative. Also, she’s never used the right pronouns. Maria has actually gone up to her office to talk to her about it, but it has always ended in an awkward stalemate. Which feels better than letting it go—but the fact is, she is too rich and important to have to acknowledge anyone who works for her in any way.
Maria yells, Yeah! Oh!
Shouldn’t you be inside working? the owner drawls at Maria, totally bewildered.
I just got fired, Maria says. It occurs to her that she could continue, tell her what a horrible person she is and that all of her employees loathe her—this is the exact moment every union member wishes for, the chance to cuss this woman out—but really: like she doesn’t know that everyone resents her. Maria looks into her dead eyes a second longer than would be comfortable, then shoulders past.
The older woman doesn’t say anything, she just goes inside.
Maria starts immediately to regret that she didn’t get a jab in, but whatever. She’s outside in the rain and she’s got the whole afternoon to herself. The whole week, actually.
It hits her again that she’s pretty excited not to have a job any more, even though that means no more money until she can find another one, and no more health insurance. Who cares. She never has to go back to that job she was so indifferent about for so long because she absolutely, completely hates her life in New York.
Whoa. Sometimes your internal monologue surprises you.
She thinks about going back to the apartment she is probably still sharing with Steph, but seeing all Steph’s things would be kind of rough right now. Then she thinks about going to hang out with Piranha, but she is probably going to be asking Piranha if she can crash at her house a lot pretty soon, so she’d better not just start taking up space there immediately. She could go see a movie, but suddenly being broke is a lot more real than it was a couple hours ago, and ten dollars for a two-hour distraction seems pretty irresponsible.
Like, bad irresponsible.
She decides to go to Alt.Coffee. It is this biggish coffee shop on Avenue A where they have computers and stuff, but also couches and expensive coffee and atmosphere. It’s cooler than the coffee shop by the bookstore. Like, in a gentrification sense.
As a last act of epic brutal punk rock defiance, she steps two feet back into the door of the bookstore and grabs an umbrella out of the umbrella basket. Ha! She leaves her bike chained up outside the bookstore, under the awning where it’ll stay dry, and walks the six long blocks to Avenue A.
It’s so grey out. It rules. This has been her favorite kind of weather since she was a little kid; she loves going inside after being in the rain, when you’re kind of wet and cold but you immediately start warming up, and you finally start to feel just how wet you are as soon as you start to dry out. And then you can look outside and see the rain, watch it run down the windows, and nobody can realistically ask you to go outside and play.
New Yorkers walk by and ignore her; cabs splash puddle water everywhere; nobody waits for the Don’t Walk sign to turn to Walk before they cross the street; rain looks like it’s freezing to the frail branches of the city trees. Maybe the rain will start to freeze, turn the sidewalks icy. It’s fall, so it might happen, but it’s very early fall, so it might not.
This umbrella is enormous and it’s got a Nike logo on it. Punk rock indeed, Batman, she says to herself as she retracts the umbrella and goes into the hip coffee shop. They have an umbrella bucket and she worries for a second about whether somebody will steal her umbrella, then laughs at herself. Who cares. It would probably do her some good for somebody to steal her stolen umbrella so she would have to walk back to her bike in the rain. She thinks about how good a hot shower feels when you’re soaked in cold rain.
UMBR ELLA, she thinks.
She didn’t bring a book and she doesn’t really know what she’s going to do at the coffee shop. Spend money on Internet access to look at help wanted ads on Craigslist? Her résumé from years ago is probably somewhere in her email. She could update it to include this most recent job, act like she
left without being fired, lie and say a friend is a manager who thinks she was a great employee. She can use her real name, not her legal one, and just not freak out about it if anybody asks—just tell them she’s trans at the interview. If she gets an interview. That way it’ll be out in the open, at least with the management, at her new job. Which will be as somebody’s assistant at a publishing company or something. Who knows.
She gets a three-dollar drip coffee and gives the barista her license. She doesn’t look at it, but she’s got dyke hair so she probably wouldn’t care if she saw the M. Maria is assigned computer number 23, but after fifteen minutes of looking at Craigslist her eyes glaze over and she’s falling asleep sitting up. She doesn’t have the energy to email that girl. She does not feel like job searching. She’s like, do I even want to stay in New York?
She doesn’t actually have to.
She goes back up to the counter, tells the girl that she’s done on the computer, and gets her license back. Five dollars for fifteen minutes. She takes her coffee over to a couch, sits down, and takes out her notebook.
Nevada Page 9
