OCTOBER 15, PART 3.
I hate New York, but I love the New York rain in autumn. Like, the November rain? But it is October and I just got fired from the stupid bookstore. I didn’t even cuss out whatsermonster. Now I have to figure out what the fuck to do with myself. Do I get a new job in Brooklyn, near my apartment? Except I am going to have to find another apartment, too.
I am exhausted from thinking about being trans all the time and I wish I could stop. If you work for the City of San Francisco, dear diary, did you know that they will pay for bottom surgery for you? It might be an urban legend. Maybe I will look into it.
It didn’t even occur to me to go out and get drunk after I got fired, which is interesting. It’s almost like I got drunk all the time when I was dating Steph and working a shitty job not because I am a total addict, but because it was a coping mechanism to deal with being unhappy.
Her hand hurts already. It sucks that being from the computer generation means she can’t write longhand, like, at all.
She texts Piranha, Can I stay with you again tonight? Got fired a little.
She puts the phone back in her pocket, but it rings immediately. It’s Piranha. She stands up to go outside because who cares what everybody else does, who cares that there are only three other people in the coffee shop at two PM on a Wednesday, it is rude to talk on your phone when other people are trying to concentrate.
Dude, Piranha says.
Hi, Maria says, maybe more cheerful than she actually is.
I’m working tonight, but you can come get the key from me at work and stay at my house while I’m out, and like, take a shower or whatever.
Thanks, Maria says.
But listen, you can’t just stay at my house all the time, you know?
Yeah. I was—
Piranha cuts her off. I know you know, but it’s like, dude, Maria, besides the occasional text, I hear from you once every two or three months, because you’re so occupied with your girlfriend all the time, and now suddenly you want to hang out all day every day because you don’t have to worry about her any more? That feels kind of fucked to me.
Shit, yeah, I—
No, listen, Piranha says. I’m not gonna put you out on the street, especially if you just got fired from work. And I want you to tell me all about that. I’m not super-pissed at you or anything, I just need you to understand that I feel kind of resentful about the fact that you’ve ignored me pretty bad for so long and now that you’ve got a reason besides that you’re excited to hang out with me, suddenly we’re besties or whatever.
Okay, Maria says, probably hurt the most deeply that she’s been in these last couple days.
I miss you, Piranha says, and I am excited to see you again, but I needed to put that out there. I’ve gotta go to work at nine, come see me then, okay?
Yeah, Maria says, okay. They hang up.
Now her mood has come back to earth and she feels like shit. Maybe she should get a beer.
Turns out they have two-for-one beers after four at Hi Fi half a block away, but Maria doesn’t wait until four. Then, when four o’clock hits, she has her third and fourth beers, then falls asleep on the bar for a couple hours. Who knows why the skinny, pretty bartender lets her sleep. That’s kind of off limits at most bars. Maybe having a transsexual pass out at your bar for a couple hours is just the kind of gritty authenticity that a bar on the Lower East Side needs now that everybody’s moved to Brooklyn.
26.
Maria wakes up and has an idea. It’s a drunk and stupid idea, but she doesn’t really give herself time to think about it. Steph broke up with Maria, so Steph probably feels some kind of good will toward her right now. She will probably let Maria borrow her car. By the time she gets to Brooklyn she’ll be sober enough to drive, and the thing is, Maria doesn’t want to be a drag on Piranha. She’ll ask to borrow Steph’s car for the evening and then take it for a trip out of town for a few days. Kind of an asshole move, but whatever, New York’s public transportation system is the best in the world, it would do Steph good to take advantage of it for a few days.
Who cares where she goes. Upstate New York? A rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike? The sky is the limit. Maybe characterizing her new lifestyle as irresponsible isn’t right, exactly, but instead she should be justifying acting on every dumb idea she has as a very enlightened, Buddhist kind of living in the moment.
She kind of doesn’t want to have a conversation with Steph, though, checking in about feelings or whatever, so she texts: Can I borrow your car tonight?
Maria wakes up a little more. There are maybe a dozen people in the bar now, way more than there were when she got here.
Steph texts back: Sure, spare key’s in the kitchen. How you doing?
Maria gets into it as shallowly as she can: Okay. Letting out some shit. Y’know.
Steph doesn’t text back.
That umbrella is still at Alt.Coffee—she was already half asleep while she stumbled over to Hi Fi. Nobody stole it! She unfurls it and walks the seventeen fucking avenues or whatever it is back to her bike, then takes her bike down into the subway and rides back out to Bushwick. She’s resentful again that the rain is making her pay two dollars to ride the subway: the main reason she started riding a bike is that the subway is expensive.
On the L train, she finds a seat, sits down with her bike next to her, and feels it in her back, in her shoulders, in her neck, and even those weird, thin little muscles in the back of her head that are obtusely connected to her jaw or something. She’s been postponing exhaustion because of the good bad things that have been happening, but really she just wants to have some place to rest, just to pass out for a few hours. Her apartment is not that place; Steph is probably there right now, although maybe not. If she goes to Piranha’s house, she might not be able to decompress before they are talking about what an inconsiderate friend she’s been—even though Maria knows Piranha well enough to know that she’s said her piece and now she’s done with it, and they don’t have to talk about it more unless Maria wants to. But Piranha’s working tonight. At nine, which means she won’t be back to her place untill the sun comes up tomorrow morning. If Maria gets the car, rounds up her estrogen and the bike rack and maybe some clothes for a little trip out of town, she can totally go crash at Piranha’s place for a bunch of hours. I have options, she’s thinking as she passes out on the train.
By virtue of never really sleeping deeply, always being tired, and having lived in New York for a long time, Maria has the New Yorker’s sixth sense about subway stops. She wakes up as the train is slowing down for her stop, actually feeling kind of rested.
Outside it’s not really raining any more. Or, more precisely, it is only kind of drizzling. It’s mostly mist, like the fog that was around the streetlights last night. It’s gorgeous. I’m going to miss you, Brooklyn, she thinks, letting herself realize that she’s actually, like, leaving leaving.
Letting herself realize is an interesting way to put it—she’s kind of deluding herself, again, already. Automatically. If I’m ever going to be not fucked up, she thinks, I need to be honest and explicit with myself. So: I’m going to go upstairs and lie to Steph, tell her that I want to borrow her car for the evening, when really I am going to take her car for a few days, maybe a week. Then, I’m going to drive down to Piranha’s work and get her house key from her, so I can sleep at her house for a few hours. Also, probing around in what she’s hiding from herself, she realizes: I’m going to get the contact information for the person she got her heroin from. I like heroin, and I miss it, and I’m not going to shoot it, so I am going to get a bunch and bring it with me when I leave town, hole up in a hotel for a while and obliterate myself. I don’t want to die or anything, but I need a clean break from my life for the last four years, six years, twenty-nine years. For sure.
Plus, what could be more irresponsible than a wee heroin bender rebirth ritual.
She chains her bike to the railing of the steps at the door of the little apart
ment building. She doesn’t need to carry the bike up the narrow stairs because she’s going to take it with her on the back of the car. Last night was actually probably the last time she’d ever carry her bike up those stairs.
Steph isn’t home. Maria looks around the apartment, again kind of melodramatically, like this is the last time. Since Steph’s not here, she actually could take a minute to round up some stuff and bring it with her, but what is she going to take—her computer? The cat? She stuffs some underwear, a second bra, extra razors and shaving cream, her shot stuff (fuck), into a giant duffel bag, grabs the car key off the counter, and leaves. She doesn’t need to bring food or anything, because, okay.
Further honesty? Her bottom surgery fund is not enough for bottom surgery. Like, tens of thousands of dollars of not enough. And she’s going to be living on that money until she gets another job, which means, eventually, starting over with saving up. So she might as well enjoy blowing it. On heroin. And on gas, maybe even to get off the east coast. On maybe driving as far away from New York City as she can get.
The Bouncing Souls do a song called ‘Lean On Sheena,’ about a girl leaving her abusive boyfriend and how nobody’s ever going to see her again because she is leaving. Maria feels like Sheena. Her whole life is the abusive boyfriend she’s finally leaving, and everybody is rooting for her.
27.
Steph is at the bar down the street, a charmless little hole in the wall that’s either so hip or so unhip that it’s just kind of boring inside. The bar runs the whole narrow length of its single room. There’s obvious rock music in the jukebox, boring beer posters, and art by shitty local artists on the walls. She’s drinking top shelf scotch because it’s hard to break up with your girlfriend, even when you know the relationship is over. And this is the first time in her life that she can afford it, even if she does have half a bottle of wine at home.
She’s taken one of Maria’s weird old paperbacks from one of the shelves that line their apartment because she realized, right after Maria texted, that sooner or later she wasn’t going to have access to all of Maria’s books any more. She’s been trying to get into it but she can’t focus. It’s a story about a girl in New York who’s a knight, and she’s friends with a dog, or something. It’s weird. She feels like you could just flip to a page and start reading. There’s no plot.
It might be a good idea to text Kieran and ask him to meet her here, but actually, that is obviously a really stupid idea. She doesn’t know who else she could call, though. She and Maria have built up kind of an airtight life together, and you can’t just call up the friends you ditched to be in a relationship and expect them to run straight to the bar. Or can you? Maybe that’s what friends do. They give you shit about not having called them in two years, then buy you a shot and then hold you while you cry and cuss all night. She’s probably never had friends like that. Now she has coworkers who are okay though. Maybe she could call Karen or Sonya or somebody, but that seems like a bad foot to start a friendship on. Or maybe it would be a good foot? Who even knows any more, who can tell? You lose perspective when you disappear into a relationship. She’s got to remember this shit in the future.
The main thing that’s for sure is that Maria borrowing the car for a night is going to turn into borrowing the car for like, a week, where she’s going to have some weird and epic adventure that doesn’t really make sense to anyone who isn’t her. By the end of it Maria will feel like she’s really accomplished something and like everything is different now, like she’s figured out her shit. Only nothing will change. Some version of this has happened every autumn for the last three years and Maria, of course, has no idea that it’s a pattern.
This time they’re broken up, though, and that’s not changing. It’s obvious that neither of them is growing any more in this relationship; in fact, that’s been obvious for a long time, which is why Steph’s actually decided to start to have a career, a life—a wardrobe that she likes, instead of a wardrobe as a weapon. Maria couldn’t hang. She talks a lot about punk rock this and punk rock that but Maria’s never been in a band, never collected vinyl, never been to a political protest, never even had a stupid haircut. Her quote unquote punk rock ethics are vague and privileged holdovers from the straight white boy outsider stance she took for the first chunk of her life, and they’ve never been challenged or put to any kind of test.
Same with her sexuality. While it’s been obvious for years that she’s been faking her orgasms, it has not been obvious how to get her to stop, to give in and be vulnerable and present for sex in the moment. Part of that, of course, is that when you’re a cis woman you can’t just demand that your trans woman partner get comfortable with her own body, her own frustrating anatomy. But another part is that after a while when your partner is faking her orgasms, you stop caring. You think for a minute, maybe I should start faking my orgasms too, but that is depressing if only because it would mean only ever actually getting off by yourself. But it turns out that using your partner basically as a sex toy to get yourself off—suspending disbelief and convincing yourself that she’s hot for you, that she’s into it—is even lonelier than never getting off.
So what do you do?
Who knows what Maria is hot for, what kind of kinks she has. Maria herself probably doesn’t know. No matter how clear Steph has been about the fact that no kink could possibly be too shameful to admit, even something horrifying you’d never actually want to do in real life, Maria won’t fess up to anything. It’s hard because Steph has understood for a long time that your kinks aren’t arbitrary things your brain comes up with. They’re not coincidences from childhood that you fetishize. Or: they could be. But kinks are arrows giving you directions. If you’re hot for being whipped, that probably says something about your relationship to guilt and punishment, or pain, or something. If you want someone to slap you and call you a stupid little girl, that probably says something about your relationship to ever having been a little girl and feeling stupid for or about it. It’s always complicated and emotionally volatile but there’s also no reason to be ashamed of it. Maria says she’s a pervert and stuff, but Steph hasn’t been able to get specifics out of her since they first got together. Even then, those specifics were, like, bottom, and bondage, and vague single-word clues like that. Maybe she’s into guys. Maybe she can only get off by literally being killed. Who knows. Steph’s been checked out of this for so long that she’s definitely not going to figure it out tonight.
This is her shit, of course. Latching onto a relationship and trying to make it work. It was like this with Rae, with Leah, with LL. This is the fourth relationship in a row where she’s looked up and realized that she’s been lying and faking for three months, nine months, two and a half years. Next time, she swears, no fucking around. No caretaking. No self-sacrificing. Next time she’s going to date somebody whose shit is all the way together, who can communicate clearly where she’s at and what she needs.
Steph thinks: I need to read The Ethical Slut again and then not date anyone for five years.
Like, obviously transitioning is hard and being trans is hard, in ways Steph will never be able to understand. Maybe being trans just means Maria can’t get off. But the self-protectiveness around sex extends to literally every other area of her life. She won’t check the balance of her checking account unless the ATM refuses to give her money; she fixates on the possibility of having bedbugs for months before she’ll even lift the mattress and look for eggs. She’s been working at the same job she hates for more than half a decade because she’s afraid to look for another one.
Sometimes it seems like being trans is the only bad thing that has ever really happened to Maria. Like she’s got a turtle shell to keep anything bad from ever happening to her, and with that shell there she can’t move. Probably what Maria needs more than anything is for something pretty bad but not catastrophic to happen to her. Maybe this breakup can be that thing, but probably not. It sounds like Maria’s already spinning it into an o
pportunity for self-mythologizing instead of for learning or growth or whatever. Which Maria will go on to talk about when she meets her own next girlfriend. Here is what I’ve figured out about myself, here is how emotionally honest I can be, here is how vulnerable I am. With cussing. Maria will be funny and kind and hot and all the things that make you fall in love with her and maybe her new girlfriend will call her on it, the moment she starts to shrink into herself and disappear, the moment she starts phoning it in. Her next girlfriend will be clear, Either get present or get the fuck out.
Maria, of course, will get the fuck out.
Whatever though, it’s easy and obvious to sit and wish something bad would happen to the girl you just broke up with. A more productive question would probably be like, Well Steph, what do you do now? You have no prospects, no desire to get into a relationship immediately, no goals, and an apartment that’s suddenly twice as expensive as it was yesterday, because there is no question that Maria’s going to want to move out, if only because she certainly can’t afford this apartment herself. There are five months left on the lease, and for the first time ever Steph actually probably could afford to live in an apartment in Brooklyn by herself.
She sees the words By Herself in neon behind her eyes when she blinks and then she can’t get rid of them. She’s not going to cry though. She orders another Laphroaig. Outside the window at the front of the bar it’s hard to tell if it’s mist or rain and she’s certain her dumb girlfriend—her dumb ex-girlfriend—is getting soaked and feeling lonely and romantic about it.
28.
The drizzle has turned into proper rain again as Maria is strapping her bike to the rack on the car’s trunk. She gets soaked. Her denim jacket was already soaked, and she doesn’t really have a heavier jacket. You don’t need a heavy jacket when you layer: tank top, collared shirt, hoodie, jacket, scarf. Of course, they’re all soaked. She gets the bike attached and locked and tries to figure out whether she should put plastic bags or a tarp or a blanket or something over it, but fuck it. Whatever. She’s a tough bike, she can get a little wet.
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