I Am J

by Cris Beam

  J slumped in his seat. The car was getting cold. We drove all this way so you could give me a lecture?

  Carolina continued. “J, listen. If I had done exactly what I wanted when I was seventeen, I would have run away with a boy named Loco.”

  This part was funny: he couldn’t imagine his serious, homebody mother running around with a kid with a street name.

  “Don’t laugh. He was loco. He was so handsome—and dangerous. He dropped out of school and already had a baby with somebody else. My mother hated him,” Carolina said. “She wanted me to date a boy from our church.”

  This image was clearer. His mother with an altar boy, with crisply ironed pants and clean hands. “Did you?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t want a good boy. I wanted a bad one. If I had gone with Loco, I wouldn’t have moved to New York, wouldn’t have become a nurse, and wouldn’t have had you,” Carolina said, touching J’s cheek. “So everything works out for a reason.”

  “But, Mami, this is different,” J said. Is she trying to tell me that mothers know best? That being trans is like being loco? He didn’t want to sort it out, so he changed the subject. “How did you meet Pops?”

  “In college. You know that story.”

  J had heard the courtship tale but couldn’t remember it exactly. Something about his father spotting the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, in a college financial-aid line, and pursuing her for a date until she eventually caved. But get to the part where you started loving Dad.

  “Abuelita is nice to you, J, but really she’s a very selfish woman,” Carolina said. “Your abuela wanted me to come home after I started college here, but I wouldn’t.”

  More Abuela, J thought. Where is this going? He shivered. “Can we turn on the heat?”

  Carolina started the engine. “I was very determined when I was young, too, J.”

  We’re nothing alike, J thought, the bitter taste rising again in his mouth.

  “And then I got pregnant.”

  J looked at his mother. She was staring out at the water, warming her hands on the vents. “With me?” he asked.

  Carolina shook her head. “We lost that baby,” she said, still not looking at him. “I think I thought if I got pregnant, I would have to stay in New York, and my mother would understand.” She sighed. “The logic of the young.”

  “So, why’d you marry him?” This part of the story felt dangerous, as though he was betraying his dad, but he wanted to know.

  “J, I’m Catholic. We got married as soon as I found out I was pregnant.”

  J tried to imagine his mother, young and frightened, trapped in a life she didn’t plan, but the picture didn’t fit with the responsible nurse-mom sitting behind the wheel. The image blurred.

  “In the end, I was doing what my mother wanted. I married the good boy,” she said. “He quit school and got a job to support me, and then I learned to love him. In my own way. Anyway, your grandmother was right about men.”

  “But Abuela was mad he was Jewish?” J suddenly felt that he wanted to defend his dad and malign his grandma; Manny was getting the short end of this story.

  Carolina laughed. “Your abuela’s always mad about something.”

  J was confused and a little stung by her laughter, by the ease with which she could turn his world upside down. His parents didn’t love each other, he had a dead almost-sibling, his mom was a rebel, his dad was a pushover, his grandma was a shrew, his whole family history had been demolished in a car trip. Was she trying to get even, make him feel as rattled as she did? Or was she playing pastor, infusing a moral message in her sermon? He went for the catchall response. “Mami, this is different.”

  “How is it different?”

  “It just is.” J felt like his brain was a game show where the words were all blank panels he had to somehow flip around to make his mother understand. If he turned the wrong ones, he’d be buzzed off the stage. “This isn’t like falling in love. Or rebelling or whatever. I’ve known I was this way forever.”

  Carolina paused. “But you’re still a kid, J. You don’t know what you are yet. One day you want to be a veterinarian; the next, a photographer. How can you say you want to be a—a boy?”

  “Mami—” How could he explain? It was like explaining the blood moving through his veins. It was constant, definite, nothing he controlled or chose. You could put all kinds of muscle and skin on top, and then add clothes and tattoos and makeup and hats, but nothing would change that blood.

  “How can you say that you’re a boy?” Carolina repeated. “I gave birth to you. I changed your diapers. I know what you are. You might dress masculine, but you’re not a boy.”

  “There are other people like me,” J protested. He thought of Marcia, of the Tank at the shelter, of all the kids he hadn’t talked to at his new school.

  Carolina looked at the water. She held her hands up in front of the car’s heater and then lay her forehead on the steering wheel. Finally, she spoke. “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to take testosterone so I look more male, more like how I feel,” J said, his voice even, his tone low. Aside from talking to the woman at the clinic and fighting with his mom last night, when he was all freaked out, this was the only time he’d spoken his desire aloud. Inside, a piece of him cracked; it was as though an emotion that had calcified into bone got tapped with a tiny hammer and splintered straight through. It was a small bone, made of equal parts shame and need, and it was lodged somewhere on the right side of his rib cage. He wrapped his arms around himself to steel against the pain.

  “You still cold?” Carolina asked.

  “No,” J answered quietly. He focused inside. It felt as if part of the bone had broken free, its sharp edge scraping a piece of rib, then floating on, looking for a new place to root. Could it be that feelings actually did physical damage? Could he really have broken something? Did the pain stem from hearing his mother’s words, or his own? He remembered what his old swimming coach used to say when the team was aching and groaning but still had more laps to do: “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” I won’t suffer, J thought. This may hurt, but I won’t suffer. The bone settled.

  Carolina tapped him on the leg. “What does testosterone do?” she asked. “I mean, Mercedes told me a little, and I tried to read that paper….”

  J glanced up. Carolina’s face was pale, her eyes even darker than usual. The bone shard seemed to wiggle, its tip pointing toward the river. Use the pain, J remembered his coach saying. Let it motivate you. “It’ll just deepen my voice,” he said calmly, “and give me more muscles.”

  “Will it give you a beard?”

  Yes, he thought. This sharp little thing is a sword. I’ll fight for what I need. “After a while.”

  “Oh, God, J!” Carolina started to cry. “Why would you do that to yourself?”

  J stared at the water. There was no answer to that question, really, none that his mother could understand. He wasn’t doing anything to himself at his core; he was simply staying alive. But saying that was too dramatic, he felt; he didn’t want to scare her. Carolina dug through her purse for a tissue. “J, you don’t understand what this is like,” she said.

  “What what is like?”

  “To have your baby change!” Carolina practically shouted. She sat still for a long time, and her words seemed to echo around the quiet car. Then she put her hand on J’s knee. “I’m sorry for yelling.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” J said stiffly, not exactly sure for what. And then he remembered. “I’m sorry I ran away.”

  “You should be!” Carolina laughed again, a kind of sad little laugh. Then she pulled J into her arms. “Give me a hug.”

  They sat like that for a while, Carolina rubbing J’s back, until J straightened up.

  “Mami?”

  Carolina pulled back and looked at him.

  “I need you to consent, um, because I’m under eighteen.” The piece of bone was a sword, though he couldn’t feel it as ac
utely now; something had softened with the hug. He got the sense that he had to act fast, before he lost his courage, before whatever had cracked inside him sealed back up forever.

  “Consent to what?” Carolina narrowed her eyes.

  “It’s just something called informed consent,” J spoke quickly. “You have to write a note saying you approve me taking testosterone.”

  Carolina leaned her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. “Remember what I used to say to you when you were little?”

  J did. He said the words in his head: You just have to be yourself, because if you aren’t, who else will be? He couldn’t find his voice; the shard was definitely gone, as quickly as it had come. Carolina blinked several times at the roof of the car.

  Finally, she pulled out of the train station and headed back toward the highway. “I’ll try to understand this thing, J,” she said. “I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try.”

  On the way home, they decided Carolina would talk to Manny, but she warned J it would take some time. J told her about the hotel and the shelter and his new school, except he left out the part that it was a place exclusively for queer kids. He said it was a magnet school downtown, and Carolina seemed pleased enough. He felt oddly superficial as they talked, as if he and his mother were polite strangers and his runaway weekend was some kind of vacation. I’m so exhausted, he thought beneath the stream of chatter. And, I can’t believe she knows I’m trans. She really knows.

  “Maybe you could stay with Melissa for a while, just until your dad gets through this,” Carolina suggested. She said she was worried Manny would tear into J for this one, maybe even want to send him to Puerto Rico to live with his abuela for a while. She argued that she didn’t know how Manny would react, but she knew she needed some space to explain it slowly.

  “Mami, Melissa lives in a studio apartment,” J said. Leave it to his mother to jump into the practical details of sleeping arrangements. Mami is three steps ahead, Pops is three steps behind, and I just need a long nap.

  “It would only be for a week or two,” Carolina said. “I don’t want you staying in a shelter. You’re not homeless.”

  “But Melissa doesn’t know”—J paused—“about me. Not exactly.”

  “She doesn’t?” Carolina was surprised. “Well, then, you tell Melissa, and I’ll tell your father. We each have a job to do.”

  J wasn’t sure Melissa and her mom would go for the plan, but when he and Carolina pulled up in front of their building, Karyn was waiting outside.

  “Hi, J,” Karyn said happily as J stepped out. Did she know he was coming? “Glad to see you. We were all pretty worried about you this weekend.”

  “Sorry,” J mumbled.

  J brushed some cigarette butts off the stoop and sat down. Carolina got out of the car. “Karyn, thank you,” she said, giving Melissa’s mom an awkward hug. “I know this is last minute.”

  “Not a problem,” Karyn answered. “We love J.”

  Wait, what? J thought. Was this all plotted in advance? How had he gone from being an independent guy this weekend, with his own hotel room by the pier, to a little kid being shuttled between mothers with psychic superpowers?

  “Okay, J,” Carolina said, motioning for him to stand up and say good-bye. “I’m going home. I’ll bring you some clothes tomorrow. Be nice to Karyn.”

  As J hugged his mother, he whispered a quick question.

  “I called her when you were in the bathroom at the gas station,” Carolina answered, as if commandeering J’s life like this was no big deal. “She said it was fine if you stayed with them.”

  As it turned out, it really was fine. Karyn put out a sleeping bag for J in the little alcove space off the kitchen, and Melissa was on extra-nice behavior, grateful that J wasn’t mad at her for conspiring with Carolina to find him. After J picked up his clothes from the shelter, he found himself almost happy to be coming home to the studio apartment he knew so well, with the cat hair and the smell of candle wax everywhere, and the promise of some real sleep. At first, J was worried Carolina might have told Karyn about J’s plans to take T, but Karyn wasn’t acting any differently with him; she just cooked spaghetti and studied her psychology textbooks, leaving Melissa and J to watch TV like old times.

  English class the next day went pretty much like math; these kids were way below his level. At his old school, they had been reading Hamlet, but inside the rainbow explosion, J found his peers irritating and slow. He recognized only one person from Monday—the feminine girl with the pink nails. And she was struggling through a Walt Whitman poem the teacher had asked her to read aloud.

  “ ‘From pent-up aching rivers,’ ” the girl read, giving equal stress to each syllable. It was almost painful to hear. “ ‘From that of myself, without which I were nothing’—wha?”

  “Go on, just keep reading,” the teacher said, cutting her eyes at another girl rustling a potato chip bag.

  “But what’s he saying, ‘with which, what’? You told us to ask questions if we didn’t understand,” Pink Nails whined.

  “Ask after—just keep going, Blanca,” the teacher said. She was short and stocky, probably in her forties.

  Blanca kept going. Just wait ’til she gets to the “phallus” line, J thought, reading ahead. We’ll never get through this poem.

  “This dude was gay?” someone from the back of the room interrupted.

  So you’re reading ahead, too, J thought, and turned around to look. It was a girl in a tan skirt and combat boots, her straightened hair tucked behind her ears. Maybe everybody’s not so dumb.

  “Chanelle, please don’t interrupt,” the teacher said. “You know better. Blanca, continue.”

  Blanca marched on, torturing the poem with her monotonous drone. Her tone was so flat, the students almost missed the “singing the phallus” line, but it only elicited a few giggles. J’s favorite line was “singing the muscular urge and the blending.” He knew this was a poem about sex, but still: that line sounded like transitioning from female to male. He wanted to sing “the muscular urge” and to blend. He wanted to fit in; he wished this whole process were less like a battle and more like a song.

  The poem was over. A slender boy raised his hand and spoke simultaneously. “Miss Charlie, Whitman was, like, with a prostitute?”

  The teacher took a breath. “Okay, we can do a close reading of that section in a moment, but who can tell me what this poem is really about, overall?”

  “It’s celebrating the body and sex,” Chanelle, the girl with the combat boots, said. Her tone shifted. “He’s singing about his glorious phallus and the woman’s glorious vessel. Very heterocentric. I always heard Whitman was gay.”

  Another girl chimed in. She looked pretty tough, J thought. She was still wearing her leather jacket in the classroom. “Yeah, and why the phallus always gotta be the center of everything? Why we reading this poem?”

  “A poet was with a prostitute?” The slender boy was still fixated. “Was that legal in the olden days?”

  The teacher, Charlie, waved her hands to gain control. “Chanelle’s right. This poem is a celebration of the body and of sex—and it is somewhat heterocentric.” She sat at the edge of her desk. “But it’s also about loving your own body, and the pleasures it can give you. It’s also about surrender and power, all sorts of things.”

  J was interested in these ideas, but Charlie was losing the other students. The kid with the potato chips was chomping away noisily. Charlie snatched the bag and continued. “And Whitman did also love men.”

  “You mean he was bi?” someone said. “Eww.”

  “That’s nasty,” the girl in the leather jacket agreed.

  Why? J thought. He didn’t expect this from queer kids.

  “Bisexual wasn’t a term widely used in Whitman’s day, so we shouldn’t ascribe language that isn’t historically accurate,” Charlie said. “But he did love both men and women.”

  J raised his hand, just a few inches from his desk.
r />   “Yes,” Charlie said. “Tell me your name again?”

  “J,” he said quietly. He didn’t like speaking in class, but he was feeling less afraid of these kids. He’d already been hassled in the math class and survived. “If there isn’t a term for something, then does it even exist?”

  Charlie scooted back on her desk and looked at him straight on. “That’s actually a very big and difficult question. Does anyone want to try to answer it?”

  “What’d he say?” asked the slender boy.

  Someone else shouted, “Tyrone exists, and we don’t know what to call him!” Everyone laughed and looked at a chubby boy sitting by the window. Tyrone tried to smile, but J could tell he was stung.

  Blanca, the girl who had read the poem, raised her hand.

  “Blanca?”

  “Well, this is hard to say, but—” Blanca was blinking her mascara’ed eyes and struggling to find words. “I think that everything’s existed forever. Like, even before we had words, like, even in caveman times. Like, everybody be having sex with everything, and maybe they called it ‘ugg’ or whatever. But nothing’s new no more.”

  “Ooh baby, I want to ugg you,” the tough girl in the leather jacket said. Everybody laughed again.

  “Shut up!” Blanca protested. “I’m tryin’ ta say something real!”

  “For reals, this poet shoulda picked men or women or prostitutes. Bisexual’s nasty,” the slender boy said.

  Forget it, J thought.

  After class, Chanelle stopped J in the hall. He had been texting Blue to see if they could meet later.

  “Your question was good,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your question in class—very postmodern.”

  J looked more closely at Chanelle. She was light-skinned, with smoky eye shadow on her lids and a clear gloss on her lips. She was pretty, in a kind of angular way, with a sharp chin and bangs that cut evenly across her brow and then dipped down toward her ears.