I Am J

by Cris Beam

  Overcoat: gray better than black, J wrote. He wondered if, when he was older, he would dress like these men. Would he go into some business that made him wear a suit? Would he coordinate his ties with his socks? Could he be a veterinarian, the white smock, the deep voice in the waiting room announcing “owner of Roscoe?” Yes, that last part he could do. For now he’d like to look like the three guys walking up the block, in their low-slung jeans and their oversize jackets. The boys were probably eighteen or twenty, and they walked as though they had nothing better to do, their eyes cast down before they glowered outward, their arms loose in their sockets, their gait wide and casual. Don’t be too tight, J wrote in the notebook. Walk like you’ve got a bowling ball between your legs.

  Carolina would be gone by now, so J trudged home slowly, head down against the wind. He practiced taking bigger steps, but he felt stupid and uncomfortable. He stopped and smoked another cigarette. That, he knew, he could do right.

  The chest binder was harder to construct than J had thought; the safety pins wouldn’t lie flat, and the material bunched and puckered and showed little ridges through his shirts. He ended up sewing the bandages together the way the website instructed, using some of his mother’s skinny black thread he had found next to the nail polish in the bathroom. It was strong enough. The result looked like a badly sutured flesh wound, but the thing held together, and when J wrapped the binder around himself and marked out where the ends should be sewn together, and added an extra inch for tightness, he felt a kind of happy peace settle down on him. He whistled as he knotted the threads into sloppy, tangled balls, dolloping on some Krazy Glue for good measure. Squeezing himself in felt mentally like strapping on a seat belt in the car, only more painful; aside from the sharp jabbing sensation that was most acute under his armpits, J felt secure and protected, and once he layered on his three shirts, he looked as flat as any boy.

  He deliberated for hours over which pair of jeans made his butt look most masculine, tossing one pair of Levi’s after another on the floor, only to try them on again, twisting himself like a Slinky to get a fair appraisal. He wished he could wear them as low as other guys did, advertising the full expanse of his boxers from behind, but that would require having something up front to hold them up. He was not about to stuff socks into his shorts. So he settled on his biggest jersey over two thermals and his biggest jeans, which dwarfed him like a tent.

  By the time he made it out of the apartment, it was one o’clock. School would be out in an hour. He ran so quickly out of the building, trying to avoid Mercedes, that he was almost startled to be on the sidewalk again. You’re a dude, J said to himself. You’re a dude. Slow down. He practiced the bowling-ball walk. He caught his reflection in the glass door of another apartment building; even with all his oversize winter clothes, he didn’t look any different. Same face, same grungy cap, same coat, same J.

  But no, J thought. This time if somebody asks, I’m saying I’m a guy. There was no going back.

  J looked down the block. Was that lady with a dog staring at him? J tightened his jaw, jutted out his chin a bit, as though he was about to nod upward in a kind of tough hello, and squinted a little, too. The lady, only about twenty yards away, squatted to swipe up her dog’s mess. The dog, though, did a double take. I’m crazy, J thought. Now I’m thinking animals can see through me.

  Even though it was chilly outside, sweat had soaked through the sides of his binder. He wanted to go home, suddenly wanted to check his messages, wanted Titi. All the earlier confidence was vanishing. He wanted to talk to Melissa.

  J was feeling better by nightfall. His chest binder was tucked away safely in the bottom of his trunk, and Carolina had just been paid, so she wanted to go out to dinner. They settled on Greek food, which J loved, the garlic lingering in his mouth all night.

  After Manny griped about some union vote for the better part of an hour, Carolina turned to J.

  “J, do you think you could take some nice pictures of your father and me tonight?”

  “Why?” J answered, his mouth full of chicken.

  “Don’t sound so excited,” Carolina answered.

  “I mean, sure,” J said. “But why?”

  “You haven’t shown us your pictures in a long time,” Manny said, a little stern.

  “I haven’t been taking as many,” J said, though this wasn’t true. He’d been taking pictures of construction sites lately; there was so much of it going on in Manhattan, and he liked the way you couldn’t tell whether the buildings in the pictures were being built or destroyed. There was something savage about the photographs, something raw and slightly embarrassing about construction sites that J liked—it was like catching a building in its underwear, before it had a chance to get dressed. Often J placed something entirely incongruous in the picture frame—something that you’d have to look hard to see, but once you noticed it, you couldn’t take your eyes off it. One time he put his mother’s Virgin Mary clock from home up on a half-built wall; another time he snuck in a stuffed elephant, just on the rim of a dump truck. He knew his parents wouldn’t understand these pictures.

  “You used to take such great pictures of animals. Remember when you wanted to be a wildlife photographer?” Manny asked.

  Carolina shot her husband a look.

  “Pops, that was, like, when I was ten years old,” J said. His father was always reminding J of when he was younger.

  “Anyway,” Carolina said, “I’d like you to take a picture of me and Daddy so I can send it out in invitations. Our twentieth wedding anniversary is coming up.”

  “You want to have a party?” Manny said, his voice rising in concern.

  Why did his parents always have their disagreements in front of him? J groaned internally. Manny hated parties; Carolina loved them.

  “Yes. Twenty years with you? I deserve it.”

  That night, J set up the lights and moved the furniture around for a proper portrait of his parents. Carolina asked if J could set the timer so he could be in the picture, too. J refused, saying this should just be a special shot of the two of them, but really he hated being in pictures, and everybody knew it. He never looked the way he felt inside, and he hated being watched. Being behind the camera usually gave him a good excuse. Carolina wore her best blouse, the magenta one that looked like silk, and Manny covered up his growing belly with a tie. They laughed when J said, “Say Titi!” It was the friendliest J had been in months. He snapped the picture.

  After his parents had gone to bed, J spent a long time staring at the photograph in the digital camera’s viewing screen. They looked relaxed and happy, Carolina leaning slightly into Manny’s shoulder, Manny’s dimple showing plainly in his left cheek. I want to remember them like this, J thought suddenly, inexplicably.

  Because what if Carolina and Manny couldn’t take his new incarnation? They had already withstood so much. They witnessed the stares, the hostile glances, the young children tugging at their parents’ hands and whispering, “Is that a boy or a girl?” And all Carolina and Manny wanted was for J to have a good life, to go to college; they’d forgone so much for this dream. J was close to tears thinking about it, the melancholy seeping in like a scent. But he hadn’t let himself cry in a long time; it was as though his tear ducts had cemented shut in their sockets. His parents, J thought, had stayed in this rent-stabilized apartment his entire life, stuffed themselves into a one-bedroom, so they could sock away money for his education. And now here he was, skipping school, acting as though he didn’t care. But he did care—he just cared about his own survival more. He hated himself, hated his stupid body. And if he went through with the change—if he took T, the testosterone, and lowered his voice, if he looked and acted more and more like a man, he’d shatter all his parents’ dreams. They’d probably never speak to him again. Yes, he’d have to take this picture with him. To remember.

  J went to the bookshelf where his parents kept the photo albums. He picked up the puffy one with the rose embroidered on the cove
r. He was four in these pictures.

  There he was in the pixie haircut; there he was at the slides in the park. There was Carolina, with some woman J didn’t remember, laughing outside on a picnic blanket. There he was, staring intently at a picture book, his face serious, the book upside down in his lap. He didn’t know anyone was taking his picture then, wasn’t aware of people watching him or, usually, what he’d looked like. He would miss his mother’s laughter, though that was rarer these days; she was always so stressed and uptight. He turned the page: a birthday. Everyone was wearing party hats, even Manny. J had frosting on one cheek. Now he’d never let that happen; every small error was quickly scrutinized and fixed, every bit of frosting wiped away. Who would throw him birthday parties after he left?

  J shut the album but then opened it again, near the back. He was older there, maybe ten. There was a photo of him with his parents at dinner; Manny must have set the timer. There was challah on the table—the ill-fated era when his dad had decided they’d all have Shabbos dinner every Friday night. Carolina had gone along with the plan, dutifully buying the bread and the candles, and Manny had tried to teach them the prayers, saying how that was his one good memory from childhood—the way his parents had stopped fighting for Friday dinners. But at that point, the three of them were still eating together most nights, anyway; the television and the computer had yet to make their noisy intrusions, and Manny hadn’t been working so much, so Shabbos hadn’t seemed so different from other times. Still, J liked the candles and the scratchy feel of a new language in his mouth. But Manny had given up on the habit before the prayers had time to set, and J was too young to ask him why. J slammed the book shut again and shoved it roughly onto the shelf. The pictures made him angry; he was so little then, so innocent. When had things gone so terribly, awfully wrong? Why was he being punished for something he’d never asked for in the first place? Why couldn’t he just call Melissa and talk like normal anymore, listen to her chatter away about the symmetry of her dance turnout, how many calories she’d managed to consume, how her mother hadn’t come home again last night? J looked around the room for Titi but couldn’t find her. She was probably snuggled up with his parents, he thought. Even the animals were against him.

  That night, J didn’t even bother opening the couch into a bed. He just curled up under a blanket and fell into a fitful, angst-y sleep.

  The next morning was Saturday, and J had to get through two whole days with his parents around, without touching the chest binder that still lay at the bottom of his trunk. For something that had taken practically the whole day to put on, he missed it. He fantasized endlessly about wearing it again, about being flat-chested, about leaving the house with it. This time, he thought, he would take the subway.

  When Monday morning finally broke, bright and cold, J adopted the same routine. He sucked down some breakfast, went to the diner for coffee, and ran back home when he was sure his parents were safely gone. The binder, in all its sloppy majesty, was still there. He wiggled into it and felt the same peace, the same rightness he had felt the Friday before. To get in the mood, he put on Yankee’s “Who’s Your Daddy?” and danced around just a bit for Titi. He practiced looking angry in the mirror.

  The No. 1 train was practically empty. J always tried to time his rides for such journeys, when he’d have to interact with the fewest passengers. He slipped on his headphones and tried to look disinterested when he plopped into the orange plastic chair in the center of the car, close to the doors. Slowly he spread his knees wider and wider, the way he had watched men do when they rode the trains. Nobody seemed to notice him. A man reading his newspaper didn’t look up. A woman feeding her child french fries was busy cleaning up spilled ketchup. And two teenagers at the end of the car—the most dangerous of all—were cracking up over something they were texting into a cell phone. J made sure these girls weren’t looking or laughing at him, and when it was clear that the phone was their central preoccupation, he went back to his music and even closed his eyes for a moment. Daddy Yankee just kept singing, no matter what.

  Where should he get off the train? He hadn’t thought this far. Probably the Village. Over the weekend, he’d read online that the gay and lesbian center on Thirteenth Street had support groups for transguys; he wasn’t ready for that, not yet. But maybe that was a sign to get off. He stood up, shot a quick glance down his body, and stepped off the train at Fourteenth Street.

  It was freezing outside, and J’s headphones were blaring “Dale Caliente.” Irony is everywhere, J thought. A school was letting out from somewhere, and teenagers were pushing each other and clumping on the corner of Fourteenth and Sixth Avenue, shouting “Marcus!” and “Shemeka!” and “You goin’ to basketball?” as they dispersed like a thinning storm cloud. He kept walking. Finally a Starbucks materialized, and he went in.

  It was so much warmer inside, the stereo playing some kind of girly hippie music. J ordered a cappuccino and was shocked when it cost him almost a quarter of his weekly allowance. Who could afford these places? He wished he’d brought something to read.

  A knot of girls, possibly from the school that just got out, had followed J inside. They were giggling and blowing on their hands, staring up at the menu board and deciding what they could buy with their pooled cash. J noticed they were all clutching binders with cutouts of boy bands stuck inside the plastic sleeves. This was definitely not Melissa’s crowd. Plus, these girls were younger. Probably freshmen. J sat at a table by the window and took off his sweatshirt, leaving on only two T-shirts and a thermal. This place really cranked up the heat. He glanced down: no bumps. The binder was working. J looked more closely at one of the girls, who seemed to be the leader, a girl with short hair dyed pink at the tips. Suddenly, she turned and looked at J.

  “You looking at us?” Pink Tips asked loudly, over the heads of her girlfriends. The girls, like a circle of birds, all tipped their heads up in unison.

  “No,” J said, and quickly stared down at his cappuccino.

  “Yes, you are—I saw you,” Pink Tips said, and moved closer, sticking her chest out slightly and dropping her binder down by her side. Even though it was cold outside, she was wearing only a thin, threadbare sweater with holes at the elbows. So this was the uniform of Village school kids—trying to look poor when they were probably rich, J thought. “You go to PS two fifty-two?”

  “No,” J answered, and put on his headphones.

  “I think I’ve seen you before,” Pink Tips kept going. One of her friends, a thin girl with dark eye makeup like a raccoon, handed her a steaming paper cup of coffee.

  “No, you haven’t. I don’t hang out around here.” J knew that girls liked the boys who were more aggressive and rough. It seemed, at least with Melissa and her friends, that although they pined for sweetness and consideration, what they responded to most was indifference.

  The girls tittered. A few inched closer to J. “I’m Madison. What’s your name?”

  “J.”

  “Cool,” Madison answered. At the same time one of the other girls, leaning forward in a dark skirt and combat boots, said, “Is that short for something?”

  “Jason.” As he spoke, J’s heart skipped. Would the girls laugh? Would they call him out? At least they won’t beat me up, J thought. And then, I could never hit a girl.

  Ever since puberty, J had preferred the company of girls—not that he had much of a choice, outside of Melissa. When he was younger and life was about sports and tumbling around in the dirt, boys were his playmates. But then as limbs lengthened and voices deepened, J’s old friends didn’t have time for him anymore. They wanted to hang out on corners and catcall girls. They laughed at J, told him his mama was calling. Girls, at least, had been trained to be more polite. Maybe that was why the “Jason” comment worked. They were just being nice.

  “What school you go to?” Combat Boots asked. She didn’t give her name.

  “I don’t go to school,” J said. At this, all the girls—J noticed now that th
ere were only four of them—raised their eyebrows and bulged out their eyes in surprise.

  “Why not?” Raccoon Eyes asked. “You run away or something?”

  By now the girls had pulled up chairs and gathered around J. “Nah,” he said, thinking fast. “I’m, um, between schools. I just moved here.”

  “From where?” Madison asked, her eyes narrowing. J thought she might be onto him, but then her expression softened, and she looked infinitely interested. Girls were so amazing this way, he thought. They always kept the questions coming.

  “Philly.”

  “Oh, cool. I got family there.” Combat Boots was suddenly intrigued.

  Shit, J thought. Caught. J snapped open his cell phone, looked at the time.

  “Crap,” he said. “I gotta go.”

  “Okay,” Madison said, shifting back her chair so J could pass. “Maybe we’ll see you here again? We come here every day.”

  It worked! J was screaming inside his head, despite the half-lumber, half-swagger he carefully executed for his exit stage right. His mind was a blaze of colors and bursting; he had passed, he had flirted, he had passed, he had spoken to strangers, he had passed, he had bound his breasts, he had passed, he had passed, he had passed! He, J—yes—he, that glorious pronoun, he had been J on a new corner, in a new Starbucks, with a new name and a new body but the selfsame soul, talking—actually talking—to other people, who believed he was a boy. And getting more attention than he ever had at his stupid old school.

  On the subway ride home, J put himself back in check. What kind of Puerto Rican guy hung out at a Starbucks on Fourteenth Street? Even half Puerto Rican. A pussy, that’s who. A mama’s boy. Nobody from his neighborhood. But in a way, J thought, hanging out downtown would keep him from getting spooked, discovered as a girl. Who the hell am I? J thought. I haven’t been to school in a week—so I’m no closer to college. I have no future. I’m a loser, a poser. I don’t know who I am.