Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  Then I noticed that all the other bowlers had sat down as well. Nobody was taking his turn. It was as if somebody had blown a whistle, only nobody had. Nobody had said anything. Everyone had just stopped and stepped back, like in a barracks when an officer enters the room.

  Then I realized that there was one guy stepping up to the lane. It was the guy who was having the great game. I looked up at the board and saw that he’d had strikes in every frame, and now he was on the tenth and final frame, in which you get three throws if you strike or spare in the first two. He’d have to throw three strikes in a row on this one to earn a perfect score, and somehow everyone in that hall had felt the moment of grace descend and had bowed out accordingly. Everyone, of course, except me.

  It was a beautiful moment, totally still and reverent, a bunch of guys instinctively paying their respects to the superior athleticism of another guy.

  That guy stepped up to the line and threw his three strikes, one after the other, each one met by mounting applause, then silence and stillness again, then on the final strike, an eruption, and every single guy in that room, including me, surrounded that player and moved in to shake his hand or pat him on the back. It was almost mystical, that telepathic intimacy and the communal joy that succeeded it, crystalline in its perfection. The moment said everything all at once about how tacitly attuned men are to each other, and how much of this women miss when they look from the outside in.

  After it was over, and all the congratulations had died down, Jim and Bob and Allen and I all looked at each other and said things like “Man, that was incredible,” or “Wow, that was something.” We couldn’t express it in words, but we knew what we’d just shared.

  I’d been playing a part with these guys for months, being Ned, the walk-on. Of course, he had it easy in a way, because everything was on the surface. Nobody knew him and he didn’t really know anybody else. He was mostly quiet—listening, recording, trying not to say the wrong thing, trying not to give himself away—and that put a barrier between him and his environment. Despite the masculine intimacy that enveloped the evening, the guys and I were really only amenable strangers warming our hands together for a while over the few things we had to say to each other: the odd fag joke or tall tale of glory days, the passing home improvement reference, and of course the ritual dissection of Sunday Night Football and the ongoing hockey season. Nothing mysterious really. The usual stuff that guys find convenient to say when nobody’s giving anything away.

  So, after having bowled with these guys every Monday night for six months, I gave something away. I just decided one night that it was time to tell them.

  But how to do it? I didn’t know. I was wary, uncertain about how to come clean. I couldn’t anticipate how they’d react. I had visions of myself running down the middle of the town’s main street with my shirt ripped off at the shoulder and a lynch mob chasing me with brickbats and bowling balls in hand.

  Fortunately, that night, Jim presented me with the perfect opportunity. He asked me what I was doing after we finished, something he’d never done before, so I took a chance and asked him to have a drink with me. He was the most accessible of the bunch, and I figured getting him alone and telling him first would give me a sense of how to proceed, if at all.

  We went to his favorite haunt, a biker bar not far from the trailer park where he lived. When we sat down at the bar I told him he should order a shot of whatever would relax him the most, because he was going to need it.

  “I think I’m about to blow your mind,” I said.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Just about the only thing you could say that would blow my mind is if you told me that your girfriend was really a man and you were really a woman.”

  “Well,” I said, stunned by his exactitude, “you’re half right.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly, peering at me skeptically. “In that case, I’ll have a blackberry brandy, with a beer back.”

  “Actually,” I said, “you might want two. I’m buying.”

  He downed the first and ordered another. I wasn’t sure if he was spooked or just taking advantage of the freebies. Knowing him, probably the latter, not that I was the big spender or anything. At that bar you could get good and ripped for ten dollars.

  When he’d wiped the vestiges of the second shot off his lips, I started in.

  “Jim,” I said, “you were right. I’m not a guy. I’m a woman.”

  “Shut up, asshole,” he said. “C’mon, really. What did you want to tell me?”

  “No. That’s really it. I’m a woman. Look,” I said, “I’ll show you my driver’s license if you don’t believe me.”

  I pulled it out of my wallet and put it into his hand. He looked at it for a second, then said, “That doesn’t even look like you.”

  He shoved it back into my hand. “Besides, you can fake those easy.”

  “I swear, Jim, it’s not a fake. That’s me. My name is Norah, not Ned.”

  “Shut up,” he said again. “Why are you doing this to me? I mean, I gotta hand it to you, if this is a joke, it’s a good one. You got me, but a joke’s a joke.”

  “It’s not a joke, Jim.”

  He shook his head and took a big gulp of his beer.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “I’ll show you every card in my wallet, including my social security card. They all have the same name on them.”

  I put all the cards on the bar in a row where he could see them. He looked at them all cursorily, then said, “Are you fuckin’ with me? Because if you are, this is fucked up. I mean, if I’d thought of it first I’d have done it to you, but shit, you gotta tell me.”

  “No,” I said, “I swear to God, I’m not fucking with you. I’m a woman. My name is Norah. Look, I don’t have a protruding Adam’s apple, right?” I put his finger on my throat and ran it up and down.

  “I’m wearing a tight sports bra to hold down my tits,” I said, putting his hand on my back so he could feel the straps under my sweatshirt. “Look, if you still don’t believe me, let’s go in the bathroom and I’ll show you.”

  “No thanks,” he blurted, jerking away from me. “I don’t wanna see that shit. Jesus, man. You’re fuckin’ me up. And you were my coolest guy friend, too. Damnit. This is really blowin’ my mind. You better not be fuckin’ with me.”

  It took a while to get him to concede it, even remotely, and every once in a while he’d still say, “You’re not fuckin’ with me, are you?” But we sat there for a good three hours talking about the book and why I was doing it, and slowly I got the sense that it was sinking in.

  “I gotta say,” he said finally, “that takes balls…or not, I guess. Wow, you’re a fuckin’ chick. No wonder you listen so good.”

  We went through the whole rigmarole of hindsight, things he’d thought were a little odd at the time, but now made sense to him. We’d have long moments of silence, and then he’d say something like, “So that’s why you always wear a sweatshirt even though it’s so hot in there, right? It’s to cover up your tits.”

  “Yep,” I’d say. “It sucks, too, ’cause I sweat my ass off.”

  We’d lapse back into silence for a while and then he’d say, “That’s why your lips and your cheeks are so red. I always noticed that and thought it was weird.”

  That was his way of saying I had a nice complexion, I think, nicer at least than all the leatherfaces in the league, which wasn’t saying much. The only guy who had a face even remotely as smooth as mine, even with the stubble, was nineteen years old.

  But for the most part, it seemed I’d pulled off Ned pretty well, because there weren’t that many things Jim could look back on with recognition. In the end, he just said, “That stubble is really good, man. I just thought it was exactly like what I’d have at the end of a day.”

  That was satisfying.

  When we left the bar that night, he hugged me goodnight. It was the first evidence that he had accepted me, or at least some part of me, as a woman. He was still calling me “he,” w
hich was understandable, but I knew that he wouldn’t have come within a mile of Ned physically if he hadn’t seen the woman in him. Some part of the truth was getting through.

  But I was still in drag, and as we hugged we both realized it.

  Jim said, “Shit, you don’t wanna be seen hugging another man in the parking lot outside a bar like this.” He pulled away quickly. As we parted ways toward our cars he shouted over his shoulder: “Hey, man, you take care of yourself over there in Iraq, okay?”

  When we reached our cars I shouted back to him, “Hey, Jim.”

  When he turned around I pulled up my sweatshirt and my sports bra and flashed him the telltale tits. “See. I told you so.”

  He winced and turned away. “Jesus, you fuckin’ freak. I don’t need to see that shit. You’ve still got your beard on.” He shouted it like a slur, but I could hear the laughter in his voice.

  And that was the turning point in our friendship. Everything changed after that. We went for drinks a couple of times between Mondays, once with his wife, but several times alone. When we were alone he told me a lot of things about himself. Private things, things he said he never would have told a guy, some things he said he’d never told anybody. He told me that he liked Norah much better than Ned. When I asked him why, he said because Ned was just some stiff guy, and what did he need with just another stiff in his life? He had plenty of those. But Norah, a dyke who dressed like a man and could talk to him about more than football and beer, now those he didn’t have so many of. People like that didn’t move in his orbit. People like him didn’t move in mine. He wasn’t what he’d appeared to be, either.

  He was a hack writer’s gift, a more complex character than I could ever have invented. But he wasn’t just material for me, any more than I was just a freak show for him. The way he told it, it was like Ned and Norah became a hybrid. He still thought of me mostly as a guy, at least outwardly. But he knew that I was a woman and he reacted to me accordingly—with, that is, one rather large exception. He wasn’t attracted to me.

  There was no sexual tension between us. This meant that he could go out with me like one of the guys and play pool or, as he would do later, go to the titty bars with me. But all the while he was treating me like one of the guys because in a way he didn’t know how to do otherwise. There was no social precedent for this. Still, he could talk to me intimately the way he never could to another man. It was the best of both worlds. Like he’d said, the best male friend he’d ever had. Of course, sometimes this meant that he didn’t quite know where to put me in his subconscious mind.

  He used to rib me about that.

  “You know, thanks a lot,” he said once. “I had a perfectly normal fantasy life until I met you. Now I’ll be whackin’ off or something, doing just fine with Pam Anderson or whatever, and all of a sudden there’s fuckin’ Ned with his tits and his beard and his bowling ball smiling at me, and I can’t get rid of him. You fucked me up for life.”

  Then he’d smile and I knew he was perversely grateful for it if only for the entertainment value. He was a freak, too, and glad at last to know another one.

  I conjured up weird pictures of him, too, though they weren’t really sexual, any more than his were. I wasn’t attracted to him, God knew. Still, my brain didn’t quite know what to do with him, either. I could see that he was a little boy inside, a boy who’d done some bad things in his life and who’d had worse things done to him. He could put up a gruff front and he was no angel, but he was really just trying to hide his sensitivities so that he could hang on to them. He knew what they were worth and he knew that I knew, and I think he sensed that it was safe to let me see them.

  I used to picture him curled up next to his wife in a small white undershirt with no underwear on, like some little kid who’d just come out of the bath, all clean and warm and needing comfort. Of course, I didn’t picture him like this when I was wanking, but then, there you have the classic difference between men and women.

  I guess in me he’d found a “guy” friend who could understand his foulest thoughts and impulses, the ones that he didn’t want to burden his wife with, or was too ashamed to tell her, the kind of shockingly crass confessions that only guys supposedly understand but hardly ever want to reveal to each other because they’re too emotionally charged. Maybe he knew I’d respond to them with recognition and sympathy not only because he thought of me as part man, but also because as a woman I’d told him my black thoughts, too.

  But when I responded to him emotionally, I had to modify the temptation to mother him, because after I’d heard some of the things he told me—stories about beatings he had suffered as a child and the struggles he had had trying to come to grips with the abuse in silence—the woman in me wanted to hold him and let him cry it out. But that would have been like throwing a wool blanket over his head, exactly the wrong thing to do. He needed to know I was there and listening and feeling, but I couldn’t touch him or push the contact in conciliatory words. I just had to know what key he was in and for how long. It was never more than a few moments. That’s all his pride would allow.

  Anyway, he’ll be embarrassed when he reads this, if he ever does. He’ll make a joke about it, or brush it off, but at least he’ll know that in my own hobbled way I cared. I hope he’ll know that he taught me a lot about how to listen to a man when he’s telling you something that’s hard for him to say. Maybe now I’ll know how to better understand what the men in my life need from me emotionally and how to give it to them.

  As always, everything with Jim was ebb and flow, serious then farcical in a blink. Whenever I’d bring up something especially sensitive with him, something that he didn’t want to talk about, he’d say, “Give me some time on that.”

  And if I pressed him he’d say, “You know, fuckin’ women. You just can’t let it rest, can you. You just don’t know when to shut the fuck up. See, that’s why you get hit.”

  Then he’d smile at me and we’d both laugh. Lots of people took him seriously when he said things like that, but that was one of our connections. We had the same sense of humor. We could say a lot to each other and we’d know when it was a joke and when it wasn’t. When it wasn’t a joke, it was always tender or raw in a way that you could never mistake. The rest of the time it was just bullshit fun.

  Besides, as far as hitting women went, I’d met Jim’s wife. She could knock the sass out of him with one look. She was a cool lady, and his respect for her ran deep. With her by his side, he looked almost like a porter who was just there to carry her bags.

  When it came time to consider telling the other guys about me, Jim told me he wasn’t sure how they’d take it. He said he honestly didn’t know if they would beat me up. He thought it might be best for him to tell them in private first. We went back and forth on it for a week or two, and then on the following Monday in the middle of the game I just said to him, “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”

  “All right,” he said, sighing, “if you really want to. I’m behind you.” He looked around warily and added, “I guess.”

  He’d kept my secret for two weeks, two Monday nights with the guys. We’d exchanged a few meaningful smirks and whispers in that time, but otherwise he’d kept his head down, respecting my need to tell the others when I was ready.

  As I had with Jim, I tried to prepare the ground with Bob and Allen. I wanted to have their full attention, to have everybody sitting at the table at once. But the flow of the game was constant, with one of us always getting up to take his next turn as soon as someone else sat down.

  “Listen, you guys,” I said. “I’ve got something important to tell you.”

  They looked at me with vague interest but nothing more. I turned to Jim for help and he stepped in to reinforce the urgency.

  “Yeah, guys, listen up. You’re gonna want to hear this, believe me.”

  Bob had gotten up from his chair but he sat down again when Jim spoke. He and Allen both turned to me, curious now and expectant. I had their ear, but I kn
ew I had only a moment between frames. I couldn’t think of any way to ease them into a sex change that fast. There wasn’t any room for hedging or segue, no way to hand off the bombshell gingerly. This wasn’t the place for a tête-à-tête, and that wasn’t their style anyway. It was loud all around us, with the radio blaring and guys cackling and gabbing on all sides of us. I knew that once I’d said the words I was about to say, everything would change irrevocably. Maybe they would laugh and take it as a joke, or even think of it as a welcome surprise. Maybe they’d be shocked into silence and we’d spend the rest of the night in excruciating discomfort avoiding one another’s eyes. Or maybe they’d drag me into the parking lot and work me over with the broken end of a beer bottle. I had no way of knowing. I could find no clue on their faces. I was just going to have to say it and hope for the best.

  So I did. I said it plain as I could make it. “I’m not a man, you guys. I’m a woman.”

  And there it was. It was out. I braced for impact.

  But Bob just nodded when I said it as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. He leaned back in his chair and took his typical drag on his cigarette, like an FBI interrogator whom nothing could surprise. He narrowed his eyes knowingly as if I’d just confessed to committing a crime that he’d marked me for a long time ago.

  Finally, with amazing nonchalance he said, “Oh, yeah?” Then after a long pause he added, “I gotta hand it to you, that takes balls—or whatever. I never would have questioned it.”

  Meanwhile, Allen looked puzzled.

  “Okay, yeah,” he said in a leading way. “So what?”

  This threw me at first. He couldn’t be taking it this lightly, I thought. Then I realized that he had it all wrong. He thought I was telling a joke whose first line was “So, I’m a chick, right…” He was still waiting for the punch line.

  “That’s it, Allen,” I said. “That’s the joke. I’m a chick. I’m not a guy.”

  I could tell it wasn’t quite registering, or if it was he wasn’t letting it. He sensed that the mood at the table was laissez-faire—pretend it isn’t there and it’ll go away—so he just nodded and said, “Wow.”