I Am J

by Cris Beam

  “J?” His mother’s muffled voice came from the bedroom. She thinks I’m a lesbian, too! “You okay out there?”

  J put down the boot and stuffed his foot inside. “Fine,” he shouted back as he laced the boot up tight. “Go back to sleep.”

  The cold air hit him like a punch. Under the coat he’d grabbed on his way out the door, J had only two T-shirts. He instinctively slumped his shoulders and ducked his head against the wind. Nobody on 170th was out. J jogged to the corner, toward the light of a deli.

  If nobody saw J as he really was anyway, he raged inside his head, then who would notice if he changed? What did he have to lose? A non–best friend? Some loser computer geeks? A school he hated anyway? He kicked at some loose gravel at the curb, felt around in his pockets for cigarettes. An old, crumpled pack was empty.

  At the beginning, when J was a really little kid, he had been surprised whenever anyone thought he was a girl; the world seemed confused and backward to him. He was clearly a boy; everybody else was just wearing the wrong glasses. He remembered the first bad experience of this, like a sour, twisting pit in his stomach—a feeling that would repeat itself throughout all his seventeen years. It was summertime and he had just learned to run, so he must have been about two and a half. Manny had taken him to a little park near their apartment, and J remembered it because Manny had brought him alone, without Carolina. After J had clambered around on the ladders and the slides, he wanted to run through a sprinkler the other kids were playing in, spouting out of a seal’s head. Manny had allowed him to take off his shirt, and he’d joyfully splashed around in his shorts. Until somebody’s mom spoke to Manny. “Your son’s so cute!”

  J felt proud and happy, but Manny’s tone—gruff, embarrassed, strained—stayed with him still, fifteen years later. “That is my daughter.” And Manny yanked him roughly by the arm and stuffed him back into his flowered T-shirt, marching him home, as though he was the one who had said something bad. That was his first full memory.

  He started preschool when he was three, and when he ran to play with the other boys at school, nobody seemed to care much. Carolina hadn’t fussed for long over the dress situation, though she had cried when J took scissors to his long hair, trying to cut it as short as his dad’s, or make himself look like his school best friend, Axel. That was another stomach-twisting memory. He had pocketed some scissors from school, excited to get rid of the long curls his mother combed after baths and tied into pigtails, and thrilled with the sudden knowledge he could just cut them off, the way he cut shapes in class. The scissors had rounded tips and red handles, and J snipped the curls off by himself in the bathroom. He stood on his little stool to see the mirror, but basically he just chopped—big cuts, all around his head, again and again, singing a little song. Carolina screamed when she saw him, called it a massacre, and J cried. Carolina took J to her own hairdresser and had her style the remaining clumps of hair like a pixie.

  After a while, his parents didn’t talk to J about his masculine appearance. They just fussed over J’s grades, praising him for the excellents he got in science, the very goods in English and spelling. Whenever J came home upset that someone had teased him, Carolina would take J on her lap and say, “Oh, m’ija, you just have to be yourself. Because if you aren’t, who else will be?” J’s dad said, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

  Still, J’s parents didn’t know a lot of things; J protected them. They didn’t know that he had started smoking in fifth grade. By that age, J had stopped praying to God for a miracle and had decided he didn’t want to be a boy after all; he just wanted to hang out with them, look like them, be like them. After he could swallow the coughing fits and keep his eyes from burning, J practiced holding his cigarettes tough-style, like the older boys did, cupped in his fist, the other hand tucked into the pocket of his jeans. Hanging with the boys also meant fighting with them, and his parents didn’t know how many fights there were, either, though J came home with bruises. The first big one was over a girl named Maria who was in special ed and was the butt of practical jokes. When three boys in the fifth grade stole Maria’s nylon jacket and stuffed it down the toilet of the boys’ bathroom, J became enraged and tried to fight them all at once. He whirled like a top, fists flailing, going for eyes, teeth, noses, and the kids tackled him to the ground, pinning him there, kicking him in the ribs and calling him a dyke until a playground attendant pulled them off.

  That word came up again and again, marking time, breaking him down. Just last week, a few days before the party, he had been on the subway coming home from school when he heard it again. He was harassed by a gang of high school boys in enormous puffy coats and glinty fake-gold chains.

  “Is that a guy or a girl?” one of the boys asked, jerking a thumb in J’s direction. His friends laughed. The subway car was about half full; it was midafternoon, and there were moms with their kids, delivery messengers, businesspeople leaving work early. J glanced up but quickly made himself busy with the Japanese comic book he’d been reading.

  “I don’t think it’s human,” one of the friends answered, lumbering up to J and kicking at his boot. J ignored him. The boy kicked harder.

  “Are you a boy or a girl?” the guy asked. J turned a page.

  “Or are you deaf?” another one in the group asked, coming up behind his friend. The four kids were now in a clump directly in front of J. One snatched the baseball cap off J’s head and stuffed it in his back pocket.

  “Hey!” J shouted. “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck me?” the cap thief retorted. “Fuck me? What if I don’t want to fuck you? I don’t know what you got between your legs. Plus, you nasty.”

  “It sounds like a girl,” one of the guys said. “Unless its voice hasn’t changed. Unless it’s a girly man.”

  “Are you a faggot?” the original instigator crooned at J in a high, sweet voice. J looked up, fury in his eyes. He saw that the guy had a gold tooth cap, that his chain had a dollar sign hanging from it.

  “No, but you are,” J said, standing up. With a quick swing, he punched the older boy in the gut and tried to squeeze past the throng and out the subway doors, which were just opening. The three other boys stopped him and shoved him back into a seat.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” one of them said, and smacked J upside the head, hard.

  “The faggot hit me!” the first boy said, recovering. Someone on the train muttered an uptight-sounding “cool it,” but everyone ignored him. J, now pinned to his seat, kicked out at whatever he could, managing a hard jab at somebody’s shin. Carolina hadn’t sprung for the steel-toe boots J had begged for, but the sole was sturdy, and the boy yelped in pain. J was hit again, but he couldn’t see who had done it; his head snapped back against the subway wall. J refused to make a sound, but he wondered, in an instant, if he was bleeding. He stayed in that position, catching his breath, closing his eyes, believing he was going to die, silently saying he was sorry to his mom.

  “Oh, fuck, this is our stop,” J heard over the rushing in his ears. “Leave the little bitch.” When he opened his eyes, the boys were gone.

  “Are you okay?” A mom with a toddler was squatting in front of J, tentatively reaching a hand toward his knee but not touching him. J looked at the woman, trying to focus, but he couldn’t form any words. He got up, grabbed his backpack and his comic from the floor, and shoved his way into the next car.

  And now Carolina had joined this league of boys, in her own way. She had joined everyone else in the world who misunderstood what J himself was barely grasping.

  A dyke, J stormed. My parents think of me as a dyke. And Melissa thinks of me as a monster. Well, maybe that’s what I’ll be, then. I’ll become a real freak. Gen-u-ine freak. And it was there, in front of the deli on 170th and Amsterdam, that J hatched a plan.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  J hit the Google icon at the top of his screen and typed women who want to be men in the search line. It was morning again, and the apartment was q
uiet. His lies were getting deeper; that day, he had pretended to dress and leave for school. He bought a cup of coffee at the Dominican diner and waited impatiently for an hour, until he was sure his parents wouldn’t come home for anything they might have forgotten. He smoked three cigarettes on the corner, then ran back up the stairs to his apartment, thankfully avoiding Mercie, and logged back on to the computer. This is it, he thought. That which does not kill you makes you strong.

  The first time he had heard the word transsexual was on a daytime talk show, when he was eleven. Home from school for the summer, J was flipping channels when Your Girlfriend’s Really a Man! flashed in yellow script across the screen. He stopped to watch several beautiful, scantily clad women traipse across a stage and kiss their unsuspecting boyfriends, who had been waiting in a greenroom. One by one, the women fell to their knees and confessed their “terrible secret”—they had been born men—while the audience gasped or laughed at the spectacle. That day, J learned the word transsexual and that, quite possibly, there were people in the world like him.

  It took J only one day more to look up the word online, finding a time when his parents were asleep and wouldn’t catch him exploring. The definition he found was “a person who self-identifies as a member of the gender opposite to the one assigned to them at birth.” For a while afterward, when he wasn’t too freaked out to think about it, he was comforted by the word assigned. If gender was an assignment, then someone had mis-assigned him. J had assignments in school; assignments changed all the time. The old fantasy returned, minus God: perhaps J could go back to the hospital where he’d been born and just get “reassigned.”

  Pretty soon, J was logging on to look at pictures every few days. There were literally thousands of websites that showed transsexual surgeries, before-and-after pictures of penises that had been reconstructed to become vaginas, and vice versa. The “after” penises were ugly. Too small, or huge and misshapen. J didn’t like looking, because the more he looked, the more he thought his “assignment” couldn’t be fixed. His assignment was a curse. “Down there,” as his mother called it, J was definitely a girl. He had stopped going to websites in sixth grade.

  There were 6,130 results for women who want to be men. J clicked on a site he’d been to a few times before. The FTM Path, it was called. FTM stood for “female to male.” Screw Melissa, J thought. Screw everybody. He was going to be more than just a hovering brain without a body. He was going to be what he knew he was at three, at five. He knew he couldn’t stay home sick forever. He was going to make himself a boy.

  There was a link on the page to Twelve Myths About Testosterone, and one of them said Will testosterone make me gay? J clicked it. Everybody thinks I’m gay, anyway, he thought. Things can’t get any worse. But here a world opened up—how had he not clicked on the testosterone links before?

  Testosterone, he read, was a hormone that both biological men and women produced in their bodies naturally. Men just produced more. Testosterone was the reason men had lower voices and grew facial hair—and no, it didn’t make them gay. It sometimes made them more horny. Just my luck. I’ll end up trying to kiss another girl. But if biological girls took extra testosterone, they could grow beards and have male voices. The voice, J thought, sweat breaking out all over, making him suddenly cold, then hot. I could talk; I could yell at assholes when they harassed me; I could sound normal; I could sound real. They’d get bigger muscles. Their periods would stop.

  “Oh, my God,” J whispered. Everything at once. The voice, the muscles, the periods he hated almost as much as the shape of his body. First the low pull in his abdomen, reminding him of the endless betrayal, and then the bleeding, that spiteful, hideous crush each month. “Oh, my God.”

  Titi suddenly jumped onto J’s lap, startling him. “Do you want some testosterone, Titi?” he asked her. “Should we do this together?” Titi purred and arched her back.

  There was a link to some pictures, and J clicked. Suddenly, there was Mike, there was Ty, there was Tate, there were Flip and Mac and two dozen others, who all (well, except for Ty, really) looked like men. J stared at the screen until his eyes felt dry. He remembered to blink.

  Where did these guys live? How old were they? Mac looked pretty young, and so did Tate. Mike looked fifty, and he was really fat. And bald! Would testosterone make you bald? Flip had tattoos and huge muscles. He also had no breasts. J flashed to the old thoughts of slicing off his breasts. Did Flip have surgery for that? How much would it cost? J’s stomach was so tight with excitement or terror, he felt as though he were breathing from the top of his head.

  Why had he spent so much time, years ago, looking at those dumb surgery pictures? Testosterone was the magic potion, a little pill that would change everything.

  Testosterone is delivered through an intramuscular injection with a syringe. He had clicked on the link T Basics to find out more. He hated shots. Damn, he thought.

  The initial elation shifted, became overwhelming. J got up for some water, gently tossing Titi to the floor. But dealing with shots was the easy part, he realized; sneaking the change past his parents was going to be the killer. His dad, maybe, wouldn’t be so bad. J could just pretend to be sleeping whenever Manny was home, which was rarely. But Carolina noticed everything. Maybe he could pretend to have a bad case of laryngitis and whisper everything at home, so when his voice changed she wouldn’t know. His voice changing! J thrilled at the thought. And the facial hair. God, what to do about that? He could pretend to have a bad case of acne and have to wear a face mask all the time. Summer was coming; scratch that. He could switch to Islam and—no. That was stupid, too.

  “This won’t work, this won’t work, this’ll never work,” J said out loud. Still, he sat down at the computer again and clicked on Chest binding. One thing at a time, he told himself. Just take it slow.

  Here he found something he could do right away. It looked like a zip-up vest, black and tight, that you wore under your clothes and that made you entirely flat. It was called a chest binder, and it cost eighty dollars. That was nearly half his savings.

  “Damn,” he said again. Titi was back, now trying to walk across his keyboard. He pulled her onto his lap. He clicked on Make your own.

  Here the site said you could just line up two Ace bandages, one above the other like an equal sign, and stitch them together. Then wrap the wide bandage around yourself, marking off the dimensions of your rib cage, and stitch it together into a circle. You shimmied into the thing like a tube top.

  J decided to call Carolina at the hospital and ask her to bring home some bandages for an ankle he had twisted on the stairs at school.

  Suddenly, the keys in the door rattled, and the door swung open. It was his father. Bulky and tired-looking, with loose skin like empty pockets under his eyes, Manny thumped his shoulder bag to the floor and said, “Whatcha doing?”

  J quickly closed the browser window and swiveled his chair around. “Nothing. I’m still sick. I had to come home early from school.”

  “Umph,” Manny said, pulling off his boots and tossing them next to J’s by the door. “It’s not that early. It’s already after four.”

  Manny padded over to J in his socks and put his hands on J’s shoulders. He squeezed, and J winced and slumped down lower in the chair. He didn’t like his father touching him, didn’t like anyone touching him, really, but especially Manny. His father was so rarely around these days, their interactions felt forced or staged, like two mannequins posed together in a window. Manny used to be playful and even roughhouse with him when he was younger, but when J had started to develop the curves he tried so desperately to hide, Manny treated him more delicately. J wanted the old Manny back.

  “What? Now you don’t even like my shoulder rubs?” Manny asked, his enormous hands dangling in space. “You’re too much, J. Go start some dinner. Mami’s gonna be here soon.” And he went into the bedroom to change.

  The next morning, J pulled out three shirts and a bandanna for his head.
He inhaled two bowls of Cocoa Puffs, ignoring his mother’s “guess someone’s feeling better,” and lied again about leaving for school. Carolina hadn’t even asked to look at J’s ankle, just handed over the bandages while prattling away on her cell phone.

  At the corner, instead of turning left for the subway, J turned right toward the twenty-four-hour drugstore. Drugstores carried thread, didn’t they? The website said he needed heavy-duty flesh-colored thread.

  “Whaddya need thread for, hon?” the tired-looking cashier asked J. It was still before eight in the morning.

  J hadn’t considered this, and he hated being called hon. “Um, I need to sew something for school.”

  “I figured you needed to sew something, but I think we only got those kits they sell for traveling. Aisle four.”

  J had no idea what kind of kits someone would need for traveling. He’d only ever been to Puerto Rico, and that was when he was a little kid. He remembered the beaches and the way his cousins were so much darker than he was, forever playing in the sun. There was always some aunt around, wanting to hug J, give him some soda or a sandwich. J had begged to stay in the ocean all day, where his body was light and buoyant and where, if he was very still, the sand-colored fish would swim up and kiss his skin.

  There was no heavy thread in aisle four, just envelopes of multicolored string looped around a cardboard strip, with a few needles pegged to the side. No way would that hold two bandages together. J opted for a pack of safety pins. They’d be faster than sewing, anyway. After he bought the pins, a small notebook, and an energy drink, J had a half hour to kill before Carolina would be out of the house and he could make his first transformation.

  He smoked a cigarette and leaned against a brick wall, wishing it wasn’t so damn cold in New York City. The smoke gave him a headache this early in the morning, like a tar balloon expanding the inside of his skull, and J relished the pain, appreciating this small control over his body. He watched two men in suits and overcoats push their way into the deli across the street and jotted a note in the new notebook he had just purchased. From here on out, J would be a spy. He would go undercover.