“You’re saying your mother died?” says Andrea.
“What? Yeah, yeah, she’s dead. The asshole.”
“That must be hard, Trudy,” says Andrea.
Victoria reaches out and pats Trudy on the thigh. “It’s okay,” Victoria says.
“I’m glad she’s dead,” says Trudy. “Total fuckwad.”
“Let it out,”Victoria says.
“Shit for brains,” says Trudy.
“It’s hard to let go,” says Andrea.
“Anyway, so I start wondering about Melanie, whom I haven’t, like, seen for six months, ever since I decided, Fuck her!—you know. Have I talked about Melanie before, and her girlfriend Donna?”
We all look at one another. Quite frankly, we can’t really remember what Trudy has told us and what she hasn’t told us. Each month we get a lot of new information. Me, I’m still back trying to process the news about her former boss, Larry, getting his computer thrown out the window of the paper plate factory.
“Maybe you could refresh us,” says Andrea.
“Okay,” says Trudy. “So Melanie was this chick I met when I worked at Arby’s. She worked the fryer, I was doing the drive-up window, we used to get off work and go out to Scooters, just close it down?”
Scooters is the name of a marginal bar in Skowhegan, Maine, a town that was also the hometown of Margaret Chase Smith, although my guess is that she never went into Scooters, and if she did, it was just the one time.
“So I got involved in this three-way with Melanie. Her and Donna, they used to have me come back to their place, and Donna would watch us while we fuck, or I’d watch them while they fuck, or sometimes I’d fuck Donna while Melanie videotaped it, then we’d all watch. But Donna was totally, like, fucked in the head, and she kept telling Melanie she’d couldn’t see me, or then sometimes she could, but only if Donna was there, and meanwhile, she’s coming in for lunches at Arby’s and basically sitting there watching us to see if we’re doing it while she’s making curly fries. So finally I say, Fuck this! and I’m out of there, then Melanie calls me from the hospital a week later, she’d tried to kill herself by leaving the car on in the garage, instead she kills Donna’s dog, Freckles. Donna’s all pissed off, so she’s like, Melanie, you can’t live here anymore, and Melanie is like, Fine, whatever! So now Melanie doesn’t have a place to live, except I’m like, Do I want to get involved with her at all? But she crashes at my place for a week, and then Donna shows up and just says, Mel, get in the car, and I’m like, Wait, Melanie, don’t listen to her, but Melanie just gets her shit and they drive off and I’m left there going, Fuck the both of them, I’m just not talking to them anymore.”
“Wait a minute,” says Ted. “Did this Melanie know you were transgendered?”
“Oh sure,” says Trudy. “She was cool with it.”
Ted nods. “Just askin’.”
“So that was this summer. And I’d been doing fine except that I miss Melanie now and again, it’s like I never connected to anyone like that before. I mean, it’s pretty spooky, like I mean, I never felt like that, ever. I mean, I don’t believe in love at first sight and all that crap, but I mean the two of us were just like, whoa. It felt like missing part of my fuckin’ arm, not seeing her. So after I got back from Mom’s funeral I decided I’d do this Internet search for her, and the next thing you know I’m looking at her fuckin’ obituary from the Bangor Daily News. She’d killed herself two weeks after I saw her last, hung herself in her attic.”
At this moment I think about pointing out the difference between “hanged” and “hung” but then decided to let it go. There are times when grammar is unimportant, and this is probably one of them.
“Oh, Trudy,” says Andrea. “That’s hard.”
“And I just cried and cried. I mean, what did she go and do that for? I just thought it was all my fault, like I could have saved her if I’d been there.”
“You can’t think that way,” says Ted. “People do all sorts of stupid-ass things. You can’t stop them.”
“But the thing is, we used to talk about suicide all the time, and she just goes and does it, leaves me behind. I mean, fuck her!”
“I’m sorry,” says Victoria.
“So now I’m thinking, basically, of killing myself. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought. I can tell you exactly the right way to do it. And let me tell you one thing, rope is not the way to do it. That’s a totally stupid way to go.”
“What is the way to do it?” says Milly.
“Helium,” says Trudy. “As it turns out. One big canister of that shit costs you about thirty, forty bucks, and it’s very effective. You need about two hundred balloons’ worth, and you’re done. It’s very peaceful.”
“Wait,” I say. “You’ve got to fill up two hundred balloons’ worth?” I’m picturing Trudy inhaling two hundred balloons of helium, one after the other, and while she is dying, talking in a voice like Minnie Mouse’s. Good-bye, cruel world. Good-bye, Donald. Good-bye, Goofy. I’m like, Fuck you, Mickey!
“Well, it’s better if you hook yourself up to an oxygen mask, you know, that way you just get the continuous effect of it.”
“It sounds like you’ve really researched this,” says Andrea, sounding alarmed.
“Oh yeah. I’m basically thinking I’m going to do it any day now. Once I get my life in order.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this,” I say.
“What can’t you believe?” says Trudy.
“That you’re talking about killing yourself, and we’re all just sitting around listening to this. You can’t kill yourself.”
“Sure she can,” says Ted.
“Thank you, Ted,” says Trudy.
“I mean, if she does it, she’s an asshole, but she can do it. I mean, she doesn’t need your fuckin’ permission, Jenny.”
Andrea says, “I think what Jenny is saying—”
“Let Jenny speak for herself,” says Victoria.
“I’m just saying,” I continue. “Listen. When I was about twenty-seven years old, I took this long drive up to Nova Scotia, all by myself. My father had just died. I felt totally alone in the world, like I would never know what it was like to be happy. I thought that being a woman was something that was just impossible, that I’d rather die than have to face that. And I drove all the way up there and I stood by this cliff and I kind of played this game, leaning into the wind, just seeing how far I could lean out into the void before being blown back into the world.”
I’ve got all their attention now. Usually I’m the well-adjusted member of the group. It’s a trait that makes me stick out.
“So what happened, Jenny?” says Trudy.
“So I leaned forward, preparing to fall, and then at the last second this big gust of wind knocked me backward, and I thought I felt this presence of . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Aw, don’t tell me you heard Jesus or some lame-o shit like that,” says Ted.
“I don’t know what I heard,” I say, remembering lying there on the soft moss, looking up into the blue sky. Son? Are you all right, son?
“But I knew I wanted to live,” I say. “And I left there and I drove all the way home. And on the way back I met Grace, whose love changed my life. And everything that has happened to me since then has made me grateful to be alive, in spite of being transgendered, in spite of carrying this insane secret, in spite of all the sadness that my coming out is now bringing to the people I love, I am still grateful for this life, and for the time that I’ve lived since I didn’t jump off that cliff.”
“Jumping off of a cliff isn’t a good way to do it,” Trudy says thoughtfully. “A lot of people get blown back up.” She seems unmoved.
“Listen,” I say. “What would you say to your friend if she were here now?”
Trudy thinks about it. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess I’d tell her I wished she didn’t kill herself.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
Trudy shrugs, looks uncom
fortable. “Listen, you all shouldn’t get all bent out of shape about this. Hell, I never thought I’d live this long.”
“Trudy, I’m trying to tell you that twenty-three is not old. I know it seems incredibly old to you, but it’s not. Your life is really just beginning.”
She looks at me, unconvinced.
“Listen,” I say. “When I was twenty-six, I went to a therapist who told me I was a transsexual, that I needed to start finding the courage to be a woman. And all I could think of was, The hell with you, I don’t want to find the courage to be a woman, I want the courage to not be one. I think sometimes that hearing about other people’s stories, their own triumphs over sadness or whatever, does us exactly no good. For me, anyway, stories of how other people learned to want to live, or how they came out as women, or whatever, always just depressed me. I wanted to say, Well, fuck you, I’m so glad you worked things out for you, but your story doesn’t help me at all, because I’m me and not you.”
And now, to my shame, I am starting to cry, and cry hard. It is amazing to me that Trudy, who wants to commit suicide, is sitting there with a shit-eating grin, while I, who love life and am so grateful for all my blessings, am sitting cross-legged on the floor, weeping. I mean, I barely even know Trudy. Why I’m all broken up in tears about her, I can’t say. But of course, I think to myself, We’re not crying about Trudy, are we?
“It’s okay, Jenny,” says Victoria, who comes over and sits next to me and pats my thigh. “It’s okay.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” says Andrea.
And I want to say, Fuckin’-A it’s hard. Now I am shaking as I cry, and little black rivulets of mascara are coursing down the sides of my cheeks, making me look like Tammy Faye Bakker.
After a pause I say, “Trudy, I don’t know if my saying this will make any difference to you at all. But you can’t just assume things will always be like they are now. There are all sorts of miracles in the world, and you have to have faith in them.”
“Why?” says Trudy.
There’s a long silence as everyone waits to see what I’m going to come up with. No one is more anxious to find out what I’m about to say than I am.
“Because,” I say, wiping my eyes. “Because life is better than death.”
There is another long pause as everyone mulls this over.
“For you, maybe,” Trudy says quietly.
Andrea slips into social work mode. “Trudy, are you on medication right now, for depression?”
“Yeah,” says Trudy. “They got me on Wellbutrin. Except I can never remember to take it. I keep forgetting. I got ADD, you know, or whatever they call it.”
“Mm-hm,” says Andrea. “Well, see, if you don’t take it, it can’t help you.”
“I don’t know if I want it to help me,” says Trudy.
“I tell you what,” says Andrea. “Why don’t you agree with all of us here that you’ll take your medication for one month? Take it every day, like you’re supposed to. At the next meeting, we’ll see how you feel. But will you agree to not kill yourself for just the one month? And take your meds in the meantime?”
It is a brilliant move, and I suspect heartily that this intervention is taught in social work school. Instead of suggesting, as I was trying to do, that Trudy change her entire view of the world, Andrea is merely trying to buy a month.
“Okay,” she says.
Now we are all up on our feet and we are hugging and kissing and we check the clock and the time for the meeting is over. So we all put on our coats and go out to a local Japanese restaurant and drink sake.
We are an interesting party, the five of us—Ted, me,Trudy, Milly, and Victoria. (Andrea never goes out with us, having, as Woody Allen once said, “previous commitments on the planet Earth.”) What’s interesting is that the five of us look pretty much like three normal women and two normal men—since Ted, Trudy, Milly, and I all look like the sexes we are presenting as, and Victoria looks like a relatively normal man, except for the fact that he is named Victoria, which you wouldn’t know just by looking.
We sit at the sushi bar and the chefs say, “Hei!” to us and carve off raw fish and create spectacles on our plates that are so beautiful, it seems a shame to eat them. Raw fish, I think, is an unusual medium for expression, and I am grateful, among the many other things that I am grateful for, that I express myself through ink and not tuna.
“Listen, Jenny,” says Trudy, salmon roe rolling down her chin. “I wanted to thank you for what you said in there. I mean, you didn’t have to say anything.”
“Yes, she did,” says Ted, who is sitting on my right. “You know she can’t help herself.”
“What do you mean, Ted?” says Milly.
“Aw, you know the professor, it’s always blah blah blah.”
“Thank you, Ted,” I say. I know he means this nicely.
“Well, I’m grateful, okay?” says Trudy. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Hey, Trudy, can I ask you about something?” I say. “When you were talking about getting fired from the paper plate factory, you mentioned something about how you had to go and take your vending machine with you. Did I hear that right? What does that mean, you had to take your vending machine?”
“I got a line of vending machines,” Trudy says. “I got about fifty units. Gumball, soft drink, encapsulated prizes, snacks. I had a soft drink unit at the mill, and they told me I had to take it with me.”
“Wait,” I say. “You’ve got your own line of—vending machines?”
“Yeah,” says Trudy, and suddenly this look of complete happiness comes over her face. The sushi chefs look at each other and exchange comments in Japanese.
“I love vending machines,” says Trudy. “I’ve always loved vending machines. I fell in love with them when I was fifteen, and it’s only gotten more intense since then. I love everything about vending machines! The sound the quarter makes when you put it in the slot, the clicking it makes as it falls into the mechanism, the efficiency of the delivery of the product when the machine is working right. I mean, there’s nothing in the world like a vending machine that’s tuned properly.”
I sip some sake. “You tune them?” I say. “Like a piano?”
“No, no, it’s more like a car. You know, it takes a lot to keep them running right.”
“Wait,” says Milly. “How much money do you make from a vending machine each week?”
“Well, depends on the unit, and it depends where it’s placed. Sodas are very high maintenance, and there’s not a lot of profit margin. People know how much a soda is supposed to cost, so they won’t put in much more than a buck, a buck twenty-five, for a can of soda. Gumballs, though, you can ask anything for a gumball, and people just shovel it in. Plus, a case of gumballs only costs like ten or twelve dollars. And you don’t have to refrigerate them. Profitwise, all vending machines aspire to gumball.”
Trudy’s face is full of light. Her eyes are focused somewhere far off.
“There’s this one machine,” she says, “called Gonzo’s Wild Ride. Have you ever seen those, like, pinball machines in airports where a single ball rolls through a whole series of, like, channels, bounces off of drumheads and xylophones, gets carried up a ramp, and so on?”
“There’s one of those in Logan,” says Victoria.
“I saw one at the Museum of Science,” says Ted.
“Right. Well, in Gonzo’s Wild Ride, for a dollar you send a jawbreaker on a journey like that, it rolls all the way through this whole obstacle course before it gets vended out to the consumer. It is the Mercedes of vending machines. A dollar, for a jawbreaker! It’s totally beautiful, it’s just one of the most beautiful things I know about.”
As I look at Trudy, I can’t help but think that for the first time all night, she seems completely animated, full of life.
“Do you have that one?” I say.
“No,” she says. “Not yet.”
“Trudy,” I say, “did you hear yourself? You just said �
�yet.’”
“So?”
“So that’s the first time you’ve talked like there’s a certain future, and that you’re going to be in it.”
“Well, duh, Jenny,” says Trudy. “Do you really think I’d kill myself before I get Gonzo’s Wild Ride? I mean, get real!”
Get real, I think. It sounds so easy.
“I don’t know how long I have to live,” says Trudy. “But I know I’m getting fuckin’ Gonzo before I go.”
Drunken Noodles
(January 2002)
On New Year’s Eve 2001–2002, I played with the band at Scooters in Skowhegan, the same place Trudy used to go with her dead friend, Melanie, after they got finished working the deep-fat fryer at Arby’s. Halfway through the first set, Shell announced, “All waitresses on top of the bar, now!” and a moment later, they were.
I wasn’t crazy about playing out on New Year’s Eve, but Grace had encouraged me to go. She and the boys had been invited to the house of our friends Frank and Sandra, the same couple who had had the millennium party two years ago. I remembered standing by the frozen lake with Luke in my arms, watching the distant fireworks, his breath coming out in clouds.
Shelley worked the bar’s large, raucous crowd and declared her intention of crowning someone “Baby New Year.” She soon found a willing volunteer, whom she diapered with a giant Depends, an oversize baby bonnet, and a small sign that read “Happy 2002.” For his humility the band gave the young man—a University of Maine at Farmington student—a George Foreman minigrill as a token of our gratitude. Ten minutes later, though, he and his grill had stolen out of Scooters and into the night, perhaps forever scarred from his moments before the cheering crowd in a giant diaper. It left the rest of us asking plaintively for the ensuing hours, “Hey, man. Whatever happened to Baby New Year?”
The band launched into “Psycho Killer.” In the midst of this a guy came up to me and started lurking in front of the keys. “I’m in looove with your haaair,” he explained, and reached out for me.
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