The police round us up onto two corners, with the exception of the sitting group, whom they start to haul off. Batons are out, extended at arm’s length, batting hands to make them release, or barring our exit onto the street. When I try to get through the police, one of them tells me martial law has been declared. “Doesn’t the president declare that?” I ask. He says nothing else, looking down, perhaps ashamed to be caught in a lie. Behind us, another group of subway travelers arrives to find they are now included with the demonstrators. Since I can’t leave, I climb up onto a newspaper box, balanced against a lamp pole, just in time to see the last of the protesters taken from the middle of the street.
The riot police are marching up and down the street in twos. It’s comical, even pathetic. They are trying to look strong. They begin to let traffic through. But there is another group prepared to replace them, and those people run in and sit down in the street, arms locked. A man on a motorcycle finds himself too close to a policeman, who whirls on him, whistle blowing, and he is pulled from the bike by two others. The first kicks the bike to the side. The biker bows his head slightly as he is thrown to his knees, and then doubles over as the blows rain down, first fists and then a baton scything through the air. “What are the charges?” a woman nearby yells. The crowd picks up the chant. “What are the charges, what are the charges, what are the charges!” She is small-boned, her hair woolly and red, and it rises into the air where it is easy for the policeman to grab, and he turns from the beating, pulls her hair, and throws her, face-first, to the ground.
Everyone is running now, and everywhere batons rise. The screams lift out of the street, and in restaurants up and down the block doors are locked and the diners are informed, You cannot leave, not right now, sorry for the disturbance. On top of my newspaper box, the air feels very still, but I am watching a boy I know walking backwards, his hands in the air, almost crossed, as people run for the curb and the V formation of police approaching them breaks as they charge. The point man swings and his baton glances off my friend’s forearm to strike his forehead. My friend crumples, his face already bloody, falling on the sidewalk he was trying to reach. The policeman responsible keeps moving on, and the two coming from behind kick a newspaper box on top of my friend’s legs, their legs rising slowly and in unison, like awful showgirls.
I jump down from my box. I am afraid he will be trampled. He is unconscious and not in view of the panicked crowd. I go to his side and find someone already there, pushing the box off him. I bend down and say his name softly. Mike, I say. His eyes open, and he is already crying. This is his first police riot, mine too. The blood is always heavy on any head wound, I say, remembering something random as I try to calm him. And I tear off a piece of my T-shirt to press against his head.
People surround us, and soon a medic appears. I follow them as they take my friend to the ambulance. “Are you with him?” they ask me, and I say yes, because it is the best thing for me to do. “Put your hand on the ambulance,” they tell me, “so the police won’t arrest you,” and I do.
I stand there, my hand on the ambulance, and a television news crew arrives and asks me to describe what I’ve seen. As I tell the story, I keep my hand on the ambulance the entire time. After they leave, I think about how, up to now, I have thought that I lived in a different country from this. But this is the country I live in, I tell myself, feeling the metal against my fingers.
This is the country I live in.
Girl
Hair
THE YEAR IS 1990. The place is San Francisco, the Castro. It is Halloween night. I am in my friend John’s bathroom, alone in front of the mirror, wearing a black turtleneck and leggings. My face glows back at me from the light of twelve 100-watt bulbs.
In high school I learned to do makeup for theater. I did fake mustaches and eyelashes then, bruises, wounds, tattoos. I remember always being tempted then to do what I have just done now, and always stopping, always thinking I would do it later.
This is that day.
My face, in the makeup I have just applied, is a success. My high cheekbones, large slanting eyes, wide mouth, small chin, and rounded jaw have been restrung in base, powder, eyeliner, lipstick, eyebrow pencil. With these tools I have built another face on top of my own, unrecognizable, and yet I am already adjusting to it; somehow I have always known how to put this face together. My hands do not shake, but move with the slow assurance of routine.
I am smiling.
I pick up the black eyeliner pencil and go back to the outer corners of my eyes, drawing slashes there, and, licking the edges of my fingers, I pull the lines out into sharp black points—the wings of crows, not their feet.
I have nine moles on my face, all obscured by base and powder. I choose one on my upper lip, to the right, where everyone inserts a beauty mark. I have one already, and it feels like a prophecy. I dot it with the pencil.
I pick up the lipstick and open my mouth in an O. I have always loved unscrewing lipsticks, and as the shining nub appears I feel a charge. I apply the color, Mauve Frost, then reapply it, and with that, my face shimmers—a white sky, the mole a black planet, the eyes its ringed big sisters. I press my lips down against each other and feel the color spread anywhere it hasn’t gone yet.
The wig is shoulder-length blond hair, artificial—Dynel doll hair, like Barbie’s, which is why I choose it. The cap shows how cheap the wig is, so I cut a headband out of a T-shirt sleeve and make it into a fall.
The wig I put on last. Without it, you can see my man’s hairline, receding faintly into a widow’s peak. You can see my dark hair, you can tell I’m not a blond woman or a white one, or even a woman. It is a Valkyrie’s headpiece, and I gel it to hold it in place. The static it generates pulls the hairs out into the air one by one. In an hour I will have a faint halo of frizz. Blue sparks will fly from me when I touch people.
John knocks on the door. “Girl!” he says through the door. “Aren’t you ready yet?” He is already finished, dressed in a sweater and black miniskirt, his black banged wig tied up with a pink bow. He has highlighted his cheekbones with rouge, which I forgo. He is wearing high heels; I have on combat boots. I decided to wear sensible shoes, but John wears fuck-me pumps, the heels three inches high. This is my first time. It is Halloween tonight in the Castro and we are both trying to pass, to be “real,” only we are imitating very different women.
What kind of girl am I? With the wig in place, I understand that it is possible I am not just in drag as a girl, but as a white girl. Or as someone trying to pass as a white girl.
“Come in!” I yell back. John appears over my shoulder in the mirror, a cheerleader gone wrong, the girl who sits on the back of the rebel’s motorcycle. His brows rise all the way up.
“Jesus Mother of God,” he says. “Girl, you’re beautiful. I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” I say, looking into his eyes.
I tilt my head back and carefully toss my hair over my right shoulder in the way I have seen my younger sister do. I realize I know one more thing about her than I did before—what it feels like to do this and why you would. It’s like your own little thunderclap.
“Scared of you,” John says. “You’re flawless.”
“So are you,” I say. “Where’s Fred?” Fred is my newest boyfriend, and I have been unsure if I should do this with him, but here we are.
“Are you okay?” Fred asks, as if something has gone wrong in the bathroom. “Oh, my God, you are beautiful.” He steps into the doorway, dazed. He still looks like himself, a skinny white boy with big ears and long eyelashes, his dark hair all of an inch long. He hasn’t gotten dressed yet.
He is really spellbound, though, in a way he hasn’t been before this. I have never had this effect on a man, never transfixed him so thoroughly, and I wonder what I might be able to make him do now that I could not before. “Honey,” he says, his voice full of wonder. He walks closer, slowly, his head hung, looking up at me. I feel my smile rise from somewhere old
in me, maybe older than me; I know this scene, I have seen this scene a thousand times and never thought I would be in it. This is the scene where the beautiful girl receives her man’s adoration, and I am that girl.
In this moment, the confusion of my whole life has receded. No one will ask me if I am white or Asian. No one will ask me if I am a man or a woman. No one will ask me why I love men. For a moment, I want Fred to stay a man all night. There is nothing brave in this: any man and woman can walk together, in love and unharassed in this country, in this world—and for a moment, I just want to be his overly made-up girlfriend all night. I want him to be my quiet, strong man. I want to hold his hand all night and have it be only that; not political, not dangerous, just that. I want the ancient reassurances legislated for by centuries by mobs.
He puts his arms around me and I tip my head back. “Wow,” he says. “Even up close.”
“Ever kissed a girl?” I ask.
“No,” he says, and laughs.
“Now’s your chance,” I say, and he leans in, kissing me slowly through his smile.
My Country
I AM HALF WHITE, half Korean, or, to be more specific, Scotch-Irish, Irish, Welsh, Korean, Chinese, Mongolian. It has been a regular topic all my life, this question of what I am. People will even tell me, like my first San Francisco hairdresser.
“Girl, you are mixed, aren’t you? But you can pass,” he said, as if this was a good thing. He said this as he scrutinized me in the mirror, looking at me as if I had come in wearing a disguise.
“Pass as what?” I asked.
“White. You look white.”
When people use the word “passing” in talking about race, they only ever mean one thing, but I still make them say it. He told me he was Filipino. “You could be one of us,” he said. “But you’re not.”
Yes. I could be, but I am not. I am used to this feeling.
As a child in Korea, living in my grandfather’s house, I was not to play in the street by myself: Amerasian children had no rights there generally, as they usually didn’t know who their father was, and they could be bought and sold as domestic help or as prostitutes, or both. No one would check to see if I was any different from the others.
“One day everyone will look like you,” people say to me all the time. I am a citizen of a nation that has only ever existed in the future, a nation where nationalism dies of confusion. I cringe whenever someone tells me I am a “fine mix,” that it “worked well.” What if it hadn’t?
After I read Eduardo Galeano’s stories in Memory of Fire, I mostly remember the mulatto ex-slaves in Haiti, obliterated when the French recaptured the island, the mestiza Argentinean courtesans—hated both by the white women for daring to put on wigs as fine as theirs, and by the Chilote slaves, who think the courtesans put on airs when they do so. Galeano’s trilogy is supposed to be a lyric history of the Americas, but it read more like a history of racial mixing.
I found in it a pattern for the history of half-breeds hidden in every culture: historically, we are allowed neither the privileges of the ruling class nor the community of those who are ruled. To each side that disowns us, we represent everything the other does not have. We survive only if we are valued, and we are valued only for strength, or beauty, sometimes for intelligence or cunning. As I read those stories of who survives and who does not, I know that I have survived in all of these ways and that these are the only ways I have survived so far.
This beauty I find when I put on drag, then: it is made up of these talismans of power, a balancing act of the self-hatreds of at least two cultures, an act I’ve engaged in my whole life, here on the fulcrum I make of my face. That night, I find I want this beauty to last because it seems more powerful than any beauty I’ve had before. Being pretty like this is stronger than any drug I’ve ever tried.
But in my blond hair, I ask myself: Are you really passing? Or is it just the dark, the night, people seeing what they want to see?
And what exactly are you passing as? And is that what we are really doing here?
Each time I pass that night, it is a victory over these doubts, a hit off the pipe. This hair is all mermaid’s gold, and like anyone in a fairy tale I want it to be real when I wake up.
Angels
JOHN AND I ARE patient as we make Fred up. His eyelids flutter as we try to line and shadow them. He talks while we try to put on his lipstick. He feels this will liberate him, and tells us, repeats, how much he would never have done this before. I realize he means before me.
“Close your eyes,” I tell him. He closes them. I feel like his big sister. I dust the puffball with translucent powder and hold it in front of his face. I take a big breath and blow it toward him. A cloud surrounds him and settles lightly across his skin. The sheen of the base is gone, replaced by powder smoothness. He giggles.
John pulls the wig down from behind him and twists it into place. He comes around beside me and we look at Fred carefully for fixable flaws. There are none. Fred opens his eyes. “Well?”
“Definitely the smart sister. Kate Jackson,” John says, and turns toward me, smiling. “I’m the pretty one, the femmy one. Farrah. Which one are you, girl?”
I shake my head and pull the lapels of my leather trench coat. I don’t feel like any of Charlie’s Angels and I know I don’t look like one. I look more like a lost member of the Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! gang. Like if Tura Satana had a child with the blond sidekick. Or just took her hair out for a ride one day.
“You’re the mean sister,” John says with a laugh. “The one that makes you cry and breaks all your dolls.”
Outside John’s apartment, Eighteenth Street is full of cars, their headlights like footlights for the sidewalk stage in the early night. I can see my hair flashing around me in the dark as it catches the light. Doing drag on Halloween night in the Castro is an amateur but high-level competitive sport. Participating means doing drag in front of people who do drag on just about every other day of the year, and some of these people are my friends. I am most nervous at the thought of seeing them. I want to measure up.
According to the paper the next day, 400,000 people will come into the Castro tonight to see us. They will all try to drive down this street, and many will succeed. Some will have baseball bats, beer bottles, guns. Some of them hate drag queens, trans women, gender queers. They will tell you they want their girls to be girls. If they pick you up and find out the truth, they will beat and maybe kill you. Being good at a blow job is a survival skill for some of my friends for this very reason—though men are unpredictable at best.
“Most men, when they find out you have a dick, well, hon, they roll right over.” This is something a drag-queen friend tells me early on in my life here. “Turns out, their whole lives all they ever wanted was to get fucked, and they never had the nerve to ask for it.”
I think about this a lot. I find I think about it right now, on the street, in my new look.
John, Fred, and I walk out in front of the stopped cars. They are full of people I will never see again. John swivels on his heels, pivoting as he walks, smiling and waving. He knows he is why they are here from the suburbs, that he is what they have come to see. I smile at a boy behind a steering wheel who catches my eye. He honks and yells, all excitement. I twirl my hair and keep walking, strutting. In the second grade, the boys would stop me in the hall to tell me I walked like a girl, my hips switching, and as I cross this street and feel the cars full of people watching me, for the first time I really let myself walk as I have always felt my hips wanted to. I have always walked this way, but I have never walked this way like this.
The yelling continues from the car, and the boy’s friends lean out the window, shouting for me. John is laughing. “Shit, girl, you better be careful. I’m going to keep my eye on you.” Fred is walking quietly ahead of us. From behind, in his camouflage jacket, he looks like a man with long hair. His legs move from his thin hips in straight lines, he bobs as he steps, and the wig hair bounces gently
at his shoulders. He has always walked like this also, I can see this, and here is a difference between us. I don’t want him to be hurt tonight, however that happens—either for not being enough of a girl or for being too much, not enough of a boy.
The catcalls from the cars make me feel strong at first. Isn’t beauty strong? I’d always thought beauty was strength, and so I wanted to be beautiful. Those cheers on the street are like a weightlifter’s bench-press record. The blond hair is like a flag, and all around me in the night are teams. But with each shout I am more aware of the edge, how the excitement could turn into violence, blood, bruises, death.
We arrive at Café Flore, a few blocks from John’s apartment. We run into Danny Nicoletta, a photographer friend. He sees us but does not recognize me. I see him every day at this café; I have posed for him on other occasions. He has no idea who I am. I wave at him, and as he looks at me, I feel him examine the frosted blond thing in front of him. I toss my hair. I already love the way this feels, to punctuate arrivals, announcements, a change of mood with your hair.
“Hi, Danny,” I say finally.
He screams.
“Oh, my God, you look exactly like this girl who used to babysit for me,” he says. He takes out his camera and snaps photos of me in the middle of the crowded café, and the flash is like a little kiss each time it hits my retinas.
We leave the café and I move through the Halloween night, glowing, as if all of the headlights and flashes have been stored inside me. I pause to peer into store windows, to catch a glimpse of myself. I stop to let people take my picture, and wave if they yell. I dance with friends to music playing from the tower of speakers by a stage set up outside the café. A parade of what look to be heavily muscled prom queens in glistening gowns and baubles pours out into the street from one of the gyms nearby. They glow beneath the stage lights, their shoulders and chests shaved smooth, their pectorals suitable for cleavage. They titter and coo at the people lining the streets, affecting the manner of easily shocked women, or they strut, waving the wave of queens. As they come by, they appraise us with a glance and then move on.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Page 6
