I Am J

by Cris Beam

  “At my job, they make me use another floor.”

  J started paying attention; pissing was a problem for him, too. He knew all the public places that had unisex restrooms—Starbucks was one of the few, and the diner by his old apartment. If he was desperate, and stuck somewhere where he had to pick, it could be embarrassing at best and threatening at worst. In the women’s room, they stared, and one time a lady ran out shrieking for management. That was in a freeway rest stop on a swim meet trip, and then J had rushed back to the bus without relieving his bladder. A men’s room was scarier; there wasn’t a word for his terror of getting jumped with his pants down.

  Zak could go into a men’s room without worrying, J thought. His body was amazing; even though he was sitting down, J could tell he barely had hips.

  J remembered the first time he had trouble in a bathroom. It was a night with his father, when J was in first grade. They had gone to see Mexican wrestling that was in town, that J was dying to see. At the intermission, all the other little boys jumped into the ring wearing plastic wrestling masks and leaped on top of one another, shrieking and tumbling and punching, hyped up on sugar and soda, imitating the wrestling maneuvers they’d just witnessed. J wanted to join them, but Manny said such behavior wasn’t for girls. J pouted until Manny promised to teach him some boxing moves later, when they got home.

  At the stadium bathroom, Manny waited patiently by the concession stand while J hopped from foot to foot in the women’s line. He remembered wishing he could just go into the men’s room, where the line was shorter. J looked at all the little girls in their headbands or Disney T-shirts, holding their mothers’ hands while he stood alone.

  In the stall, J tried what he had mastered at home—the art of peeing standing up. He had watched his father do it a few times, when he forgot to close the door, or when J was in the bath and his father really had to go. But J couldn’t do it as Manny did—standing away from the toilet. When he’d tried this behind a locked bathroom door, the pee didn’t arc up and out, like his father’s, but rather trailed down his leg and into a puddle on the floor. Countless cleanups later, J had found a way. He could lift the lid, straddle the bowl, and pee straight down while standing. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked.

  But in the stadium stall, something went terribly wrong. The toilet there was wider, or somehow different from the one at home, and his practiced straddle was off balance. Instead of landing in the bowl, the pee veered down his right leg and onto the jeans bunched around his ankles. He desperately mopped at the darkening denim with toilet paper, but it was too late.

  At the concession stand, he’d asked for a Mountain Dew, which Manny said was too expensive. J begged and when Manny caved, J promptly spilled the whole thing on his pants, covering the stain and the smell. Manny was angry, and J had tried hard not to cry about the whole sorry mess.

  Still, that night J did learn some boxing moves—the hook, the uppercut, and the jab—that Manny had learned in the Bronx. Manny wore a pillow stuffed up under his shirt and got on his knees so they’d be closer in height, and he let J pop him as many times as he wished, until Carolina shouted from the kitchen that she couldn’t stand the noise any longer. J crawled into bed that night with his right shoulder sore and his knuckles raw from hitting the buttons on his dad’s old workshirt, but he felt a kind of happiness, too, that almost erased the bathroom debacle. He’d forgotten about that night until now. Manny had been good to him once.

  Someone in the support group was passing out stickers. WE PEE, TOO, they said. GENDER-NEUTRAL BATHROOMS FOR GENDER-VARIANT PEOPLE.

  “You can just stick these over the men’s or women’s bathroom signs wherever you go,” a white kid with red spiky hair was saying. “It’s part of the new We-Pee campaign. It’s cool because with their own signs covered, cisgender people don’t know where to go, either.”

  Cisgender, J thought. What the—? But everyone else seemed to buzz right along.

  “Is that safe for women, though?” J looked at the person who’d said this. He was a serious-looking guy in glasses. This room had all kinds. “I mean, bathrooms can be a safe space for women.”

  “We don’t have a safe space!” This was from a younger, grungier-looking guy. J thought he probably worked in a health food store, like the one that Melissa liked, the one that smelled like sweat.

  J had never thought about space being safe before. Space was, well, just space. People were unsafe. Sometimes the thoughts he had weren’t so safe. Was the mind a space? Was Chanelle’s idea of living in a different era a safe space for her? He thought his sleeping bag was, maybe, a safe space, and wherever Titi was, that was safe, too. And the space he saw when he looked through his camera and framed a really good shot.

  And maybe this room was a little bit safe. He’d never been anywhere where people talked about bathrooms before, and how something so pedestrian could feel so menacing, could pose a problem every single day. These guys knew what he’d been through, and he didn’t even have to tell them. Even though J didn’t speak, even though he felt jealous of Zak’s muscles and ease, it was as though he’d found some clan of cousins he never knew he had, or needed. The support group wasn’t like finding a home, exactly, as Philip had espoused, but more of a garage next to the home—somewhere kind of offset and funky, where you wanted to hang out and explore what was inside.

  The guys milled around after the meeting, but J didn’t have anyone to talk to, so he pretended to be busy with his phone and slipped out the door. Once outside, though, he heard his name.

  “J!” It was Zak, pulling on a leather jacket and jogging to catch up.

  J hoped his grin didn’t look too goofy.

  “How’d you like the meeting?”

  J told him it was good. He wanted to ask what cisgender meant, but he felt too shy.

  “Will you come back next week?”

  Is this his job to ask me? J wondered. “Sure,” he said. He lit a cigarette.

  Zak gave J his phone number, in case he had any questions.

  “Where do you work out?” J asked. That wasn’t the question he was expecting. His mind was getting ahead of his mouth these days.

  Zak chuckled. “Just a Y in Brooklyn. And I have a chin-up bar at home. Three sets of ten each morning.”

  “Wow.” J could barely do one, and he had to jump. I need, J thought. I need, what? He suddenly had an urge to wrestle with Zak, just knock him into the pile of dirty snow and roll around like kids. He stubbed out his cigarette with his sneaker, ground it hard into the concrete.

  “Well, see you next week,” Zak said, and jogged back into the building.

  It took Blue a week to respond to J’s e-mail. There was nothing in the subject line, save for a series of question marks. “Call me,” she wrote inside. Nothing more. Not even her name.

  He did, and got her voice mail. He left a mostly incoherent message, apologizing for the poem. He knew it was too much—he’d been a fool, he knew it when Chanelle started busting out the Shakespeare, but still he tried to sound casual on the phone, normal even, except he wasn’t that, never normal, and couldn’t they meet in person, maybe just for coffee?

  He called Chanelle for advice.

  “Bring her flowers,” she said authoritatively. “Women love that.”

  “But what if she’s still mad at me?” He was beginning to doubt Chanelle’s quick answers for everything, her rigid definitions of what women and men did or enjoyed, when she herself so clearly fell outside the boundaries.

  “Am I not the one in a successful relationship?” Chanelle shot back. “Believe me. A poem and flowers fix everything.”

  J kept his thoughts to himself and hung up the phone. “I liked your poem,” Blue said when she called back. “I didn’t know you wrote.”

  “I don’t,” J bumbled. “I mean, only sometimes.”

  They met outside Blue’s school, J skipping his last class to make sure she wouldn’t have to wait. He didn’t bring flowers.

  He wanted
to tell her how sexy she looked, in her old-man overcoat and her pom-pom hat, her cheeks all flushed and wintry, but Blue’s hands were shoved deep into her pockets, and her mouth turned up only the tiniest smile when she said hello. There was something both grave and watery in her eyes—was it anger? Betrayal? He couldn’t tell. But he didn’t dare reach to hug her or say anything beyond a quick hi.

  “Let’s walk,” Blue said when he offered to buy her a cappuccino, the kind Blue liked, with the whipped cream and the caramel drizzled on top.

  And so they did. Three long blocks east, before Blue said anything. “I’ve been painting monsters.”

  J felt trepidatious. “What kind?”

  “Little ones. In windows, and in hair, behind buildings. Places you can’t see unless you really look.”

  J thought of the Virgin Mary clock, the stuffed elephant that he used to stick in photographs of construction sites. “Why?”

  “Monsters are interesting. They’re like demons but more childlike. We only choose to believe in them.” Blue quickly glanced at J.

  “What does your sister think of your paintings?”

  “Jadzia?” Blue scratched her nose, looked up. “Jadzia’s complicated. I don’t know what she thinks of my paintings, really. She wants to be a nun.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Jadzia tries to be kind to everybody, but it’s like she’s in a kind of trance. Mama will die if she goes to a convent, but she has one all picked out. It’s super-strict, in Spain.”

  How could a parent be upset that a daughter was too religious? J wondered.

  “Mama wants grandkids,” Blue said. “And I don’t want children, I don’t think. I just want to paint. And Jadzia, if she’s a nun—we’ll both just disappoint her.”

  Maybe all kids disappoint their mothers in the end, J thought. He’d never considered this before. Well, except Melissa. Karyn would be proud of Melissa forever. “You don’t want kids?”

  “Kids are annoying. I can’t even paint when the day care is open,” Blue said. “What did you mean by ‘my dreams cross between blue rocks’? In the poem?”

  J tried to remember the poem he sent, and he felt his cheeks flush. “I don’t know. Because Blue is your name.”

  “But why rocks?”

  Damn, J thought. He knew this poem would come back to bite him in the ass. Why rocks, why rocks?

  Blue stopped walking. They were in front of a pet store, where white puppies tumbled and jumped in a cage in the window. “That’s so mean, how they keep them locked up like that,” Blue said. And there it was, that softness in her eyes, that same tenderness she had shown when she looked at J as she sketched him that afternoon. But then her eyes glinted with something harder, more inscrutable. “Did you really write that poem?”

  J shifted, kept his eyes on the dogs. “I borrowed some lines.”

  “Hmm,” Blue said, but her face was unreadable. “Let’s go in for a minute. It’s freezing out here.”

  The pet store was warm and smelled like wood chips and dog kibble. They looked at the fish, a large tank filled with tetras, and then the turtles, slow and sleepy under their heat lamp. Blue asked J if he really did ever have a girlfriend back in Philly.

  Where’d that come from? J thought. He tried to remember what he’d made up about the phantom Philly girl. “Of course,” he said, sounding offended. “You don’t believe me?”

  “There are just little monsters we all have in our hair,” she said, forcing a smile.

  J looked at Blue’s hair, messy from the hat she’d taken off. Her blond roots were showing, and the blue had faded to a washed-out denim color. She’d removed her scarf, too, and J noticed she wasn’t wearing the necklace. He followed Blue to the hamster cages.

  “So tell me about her,” Blue said. “This old girlfriend.”

  “Um, I don’t feel like talking about her,” J said. His stomach was going soft and quaky.

  “Did she look like me?”

  “No.”

  “Did she look like… Kobe Bryant?”

  What?! Meaning, did she look like a man? Was she black? Was she insanely tall? Did she have tattoos everywhere? J started to laugh, but the look on Blue’s face stopped him cold. She was completely serious.

  “J, please don’t lie to me.”

  J watched the hamsters. He didn’t know what to say. Kobe Bryant? “You know, some mothers eat their children.”

  “The females of some species can be pretty aggressive,” Blue answered.

  She knows, J thought. That’s it. He traced his finger along the glass of the hamster cage. That word—aggressive—she definitely knew. And now she was just toying with him, the way an animal toys with prey. Why did I ever think I could get away with it, before T? He caught his reflection in the glass—that jaw too soft, that neck too thin. But Kobe Bryant?

  “So there never was a girlfriend?”

  J slowly shook his head. He felt sad. There was no relief, just a heavy sadness—the kind that comes when you realize that people die and they never come back, or your father just may never love you again.

  “But—” Blue paused. “A boyfriend?”

  “What?” J was genuinely surprised. Never in his whole life had he been attracted to guys—except, maybe, for Zak. He didn’t know what that was about.

  “Don’t mess with my head, J. We’ve been through enough,” Blue sounded like a very old woman, and J might have laughed at the telenovela sigh coming from her pixie face, except he knew he shouldn’t. He felt that he was in trouble for something he didn’t understand. Blamed for stealing the cookies when he really drank the milk.

  “Why would I have a boyfriend, Blue? I’m not gay.” It was so hot in the pet store, and J could smell animal urine faintly soaking in the wood chips.

  “Okay, bi, then.”

  “Why would I be bi?” He felt caged. He decided to try a tack his mother always used. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Blue didn’t answer, but then she, too, looked caught. Her eyes welled. She really wasn’t good at arguing. Suddenly J got it.

  “You think because I wrote you a poem that I’m gay? That only gay guys write poems?”

  Blue looked confused for a moment, and then she nodded.

  “That’s idiotic.” J had never felt particularly defensive of gay people before, but now, suddenly, he did. The stereotypes of gay men being more sensitive or more feminine—J thought of his classmate Tyrone. Tyrone didn’t fit any gay stereotype; he was just awkward and uncomfortable. And the other kids at school, there were so many “types”—there were aggressives and femmes, but there were also nerds and goths and punks and athletes, and every one of them queer in some way. “Don’t tell her.” Chanelle’s words rang in J’s head. “A lover will drop you in a quick minute if she knows you’re trans.”

  So she must not know, J thought.

  “I need to think,” Blue said, wrapping her scarf around her neck.

  “So do I,” J answered. “So do I.”

  As she ducked out the door of the pet store, Blue looked back over her shoulder. She was crying again. “Boyfriends don’t ignore girls for two months, J. And boyfriends don’t call girlfriends ‘idiotic.’ ”

  The door shut with a jingle. And girlfriends don’t call boyfriends gay, J thought, zipping up his jacket. Just because they wrote a poem. He looked at the puppies trapped in their cage. How were puppies born in winter? Or didn’t write a poem. Some miracle of science. And boyfriends don’t lie to girlfriends about their gender. Weren’t puppies born in spring? Or didn’t lie, not exactly. My God, they’re trampling on the littlest one. My gender’s not a lie. I am not a lie. Art is the lie that tells the truth. You should know that, Blue. You, especially. I don’t need a girlfriend so badly that I’m willing to settle for such madness.

  J wasn’t looking forward to telling Chanelle that the poem had bombed. She’d had such high hopes; why was he always letting everybody down? He caught her at the elevator before school. She asked him
how it went yesterday, her eyes eager and almost hungry.

  “Sorry, Chanelle. I suck at this.”

  “What happened?” She pushed the elevator button for their floor.

  J adjusted the straps on his backpack. “It’s ’cause I’m trans. Blue doesn’t understand me.”

  “Bullshit!” Chanelle turned on him. “That’s a tired excuse. Didn’t I tell you not to tell her? What’s going to happen with the double date now? I needed you for this, J. Things are bad for me and Bonez.”

  J felt his mouth open in protest, but no sound came out. They’d reached their floor. How was he supposed to help her? The poem was rititulous, anyway. And he wasn’t used to being needed by anyone. That was new.

  “Chanelle, wait!” She was striding across the reception area toward their classroom. There was still twenty minutes until class. She turned, and her eyes had filled. J caught up. “What’s so bad with you and Bonez?”

  Chanelle jutted her head toward the EXIT sign and the stairwell, where they could hide out. When the door had safely closed, they plopped down and each lit a cigarette. It reminded him of the old days, with Melissa.

  “The question is,” Chanelle answered, “what’s good?”

  J inhaled some smoke and waited.

  “Men have it easy,” Chanelle said, pulling back her bangs. “They can just give flowers and be done with it. Women, we have nothing to give but our feelings, and men don’t want that.”

  “What do they want?” J asked. Chanelle’s internal book of rules was getting weirder and weirder.

  She looked at J like he was patently stupid. “Our bodies! God, J, where have you been?”

  Did he just want Blue’s body? If that was all, he could have probably made it beyond a snowy kiss. He wanted to be understood, underneath it all, and he was a man. Maybe Chanelle sort of hated men, if she thought they were so simple. He took a risk. “Do you hate men?”

  J was prepared for one of Chanelle’s quick bites, but instead she just sat there, thoughtfully blowing smoke rings. “Probably,” she said quietly. “At least I hate the man in me.”