“I don’t want guys to see me as a big passive bottom,” Manus would say. “It’s not like I’d just flop there and let just any guy bone me.”
Manus would leave a ring of shaved hairs and bronzer scum around the bathtub and expect me to scrub.
Always in the background was the idea of going back to an assignment where people shot at you, criminals with nothing to lose if you got killed.
And maybe Manus could bust some old tourist who found the cruisy part of Washington Park by accident, but most days the precinct commander was on him to start training a younger replacement.
Most days, Manus would untangle a silver metallic tiger-stripe string bikini out of the knotted mess in his underwear drawer. He’d strain his ass into this little A-cup nothing and look at himself in the mirror sideways, frontways, backward, then tear it off and leave the stretched, dead little animal print on the bed for me to find. This would go on through zebra stripes, tiger stripes, leopard spots, then cheetah, panther, puma, ocelot, until he ran out of time.
“These are my lucky lifeguard ’kinis,” he’d tell me. “Be honest.”
And this is what I kept telling myself was love.
Be honest? I wouldn’t know where to start. I was so out of practice.
After Las Vegas, we rented one of those family vans. Eberhard Faber became Hewlett Packard. Brandy wore a long white cotton piqué dress with open strappy sides and a high slit up the skirt that was totally inappropriate for the entire state of Utah. We stopped and tasted the Great Salt Lake.
This just seemed like the thing to do.
I was always writing in the sand, writing in the dust on the car:
maybe your sister is in the next town.
Writing: here, take a few more Vicodins.
It was after Manus couldn’t get guys to approach him for sex that he started into buying man-on-man sex magazines and going out to gay clubs.
“Research,” he’d say.
“You can come with,” he’d tell me, “but don’t stand too close, I don’t want to send out the wrong signal.”
After Utah, Brandy turned Hewlett Packard into Harper Collins in Butte. There in Montana, we rented a Ford Probe and Harper drove with me squashed in the backseat, and every once in a while Harper would say, “We’re going one hundred and ten miles an hour.”
Brandy and me, we’d shrug.
Speeding didn’t seem like anything in a place as big as Montana.
maybe your sister’s not even in the united states, I wrote in lipstick on a bathroom mirror in a motel in Great Falls.
So to keep Manus’s job, we went out to gay bars, and I sat alone and told myself that it was different for men, the good looks thing was. Manus flirted and danced and sent drinks down the bar to whoever looked like a challenge. Manus would slip onto the barstool next to mine and whisper out the side of his mouth.
“I can’t believe he’s with that guy,” he’d say.
Manus would nod just enough for me to figure out which guy.
“Last week, he wouldn’t give me the time of day,” Manus would rant under his breath. “I wasn’t good enough, and that trashy, bottle-blond piece of garbage is supposed to be better?”
Manus would hunch over his drink and say, “Guys are so fucked up.”
And I’d be, like, no duh.
And I told myself it was okay. Any relationship I could be in would have these rough times.
Jump to Calgary, Alberta, where Brandy ate Nebalino suppositories wrapped in gold foil because she thought they were Almond Roca. She got so ripped, she turned Harper Collins into Addison Wesley. Most of Calgary, Brandy wore a white, quilted ski jacket with a faux-fur collar and a white bikini bottom by Donna Karan. The look was fun and spirited and we felt light and popular.
Evenings called for a black-and-white-striped floor-length coat dress that Brandy could never keep buttoned up, with black wool hot pants on underneath. Addison Wesley turned into Nash Rambler, and we rented another Cadillac.
Jump to Edmonton, Alberta, Nash Rambler turned into Alfa Romeo. Brandy wore these crinoline shorty-short square dance petticoats over black tights tucked into cowboy boots. Brandy wore this push-up bustier made of leather with local cattle brands burned all over it.
In a nice hotel bar in Edmonton, Brandy says, “I hate it when you can see the seam in your martini glass. I mean, I can feel the mold line. It’s so cheap.”
Guys all over her. Like spotlights, I remember that kind of attention. That whole country, Brandy never had to buy her own drinks, not once.
Jump to Manus losing his assignment as an independent special contract vice operative to the detective division of the Metropolitan Police Department. My point is, he never really got over it.
He was running out of money. It’s not like there was a lot in the bank to begin with. Then the birds ate my face.
What I didn’t know is, there was Evie Cottrell living alone in her big lonesome house with all her Texas land and oil money, saying, hey, she had some work that needed doing. And Manus with his driving need to prove he can still pee on every tree. That mirror-mirror kind of power. The rest you already know.
Jump to us on the road, after the hospital, after the Rhea sisters, and I keep slipping the hormones, the Provera and Climara and Premarin, into what he ate and drank. Whiskey and estradiol. Vodka and ethinyl estradiol. It was so easy it was scary. He was all the time making big cow eyes at Brandy.
We were all running from something. Vaginoplasty. Aging. The future.
Jump to Los Angeles.
Jump to Spokane.
Jump to Boise and San Diego and Phoenix.
Jump to Vancouver, British Columbia, where we were Italian expatriates speaking English as a second language until there wasn’t a native tongue among us.
“You have two of the breasts of a young woman,” Alfa Romeo told a realtor I can’t remember in which house.
From Vancouver, we reentered the United States as Brandy, Seth, and Bubba-Joan via the Princess Princess’s very professional mouth. All the way to Seattle, Brandy read to us how a little Jewish girl with a mysterious muscle disease turned herself into Rona Barrett.
All of us looking at big rich houses, picking up drugs, renting cars, buying clothes, and taking clothes back.
“Tell us a gross personal story,” Brandy says en route to Seattle. Brandy all the time being the boss of me. Being this close to death herself.
Rip yourself open.
Tell me my life story before I die.
Sew yourself shut.
Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Fifteen
ump to this one time, nowhere special, just Brandy and me in the speech therapist office when Brandy catches me with my hands up under my veil, touching the seashells and ivory of my exposed molars, stroking the embossed leather of my scar tissue, dry and polished from my breath going back and forth across it. I’m touching the saliva where it dries sticky and raw down the sides of my neck, and Brandy says not to watch myself too close.
“Honey,” she says, “times like this, it helps to think of yourself as a sofa or a newspaper, something made by a lot of other people but not made to last forever.”
The open edge of my throat feels starched and plastic, ribbed-knitted and stiff with sizing and interfacing. It’s the same feel as the top edge of a strapless dress or maillot, held up with wire or plastic stays sewn inside. Hard but warm the way pink looks. Bony but covered in soft, touchable skin.
This kind of acute traumatic mandibulectomy without reconstruction, before decannulation of the tracheostomy tube can lead to sleep apnea, the doctors said. This was them talking to each other during morning rounds.
And people find me hard to understand.
What the doctors told me was unless they rebuilt me some kind of jaw, at least some kind of flap, they said, I could die anytime I fell asleep. I could just stop breathing and not wake up. A quick, painless death.
On my pad with my pen, I wrote:
don’t tease.
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Us in the speech therapist office, Brandy says, “It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is,” Brandy says. “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product,” Brandy says.
Sometimes your best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize.
“My point being,” Brandy says, “is you can’t escape the world, and you’re not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt-ugly. You’re not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It’s all out of your hands,” Brandy says.
The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill.
“There isn’t any real you in you,” she says. “Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years.”
Skin, bones, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited.
“Relax,” Brandy says, “Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.”
Up under my veil, I finger the wet poking stub of a tongue from some vandalized product. The doctors suggested using part of my small intestine to make my throat longer. They suggested carving the shinbones, the fibulas of this human product I am, shaping the bones and grafting them to build me, build the product, a new jawbone.
On my pad, I wrote:
the leg-bone connected to the head-bone?
The doctors didn’t get it.
Now hear the word of the Lord.
“You’re a product of our language,” Brandy says, “and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you,” she says. “Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe because you’re so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you can conceive of it. You can’t imagine any way to escape. There’s no way you can get out,” Brandy says.
“The world,” Brandy says, “is your cradle and your trap.”
This is after I backslid. I wrote to my booker at the agency and asked about my chances of getting hand or foot work. Modeling watches and shoes. My booker had sent me some flowers in the hospital early on. Maybe I could pick up assignments as a leg model. How much Evie had blabbed to them, I didn’t know.
To be a hand model, he wrote back, you have to wear a size seven glove and a size five ring. A foot model must have perfect toenails and wear a size six shoe. A leg model can’t play any sports. She can’t have any visible veins. Unless your fingers and toes still look good printed in a magazine at three times their normal size, or billboarded at two hundred times their size, he wrote, don’t count on body part work.
My hand’s an eight. My foot, a seven.
Brandy says, “And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that’s a trap, too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap.”
The books on plastic surgery, the pamphlets and brochures, all promised to help me live a more normal, happy life; but less and less this looked like what I’d want. What I wanted looked more and more like what I’d always been trained to want. What everybody wants.
Give me attention.
Flash.
Give me beauty.
Flash.
Give me peace and happiness, a loving relationship, and a perfect home.
Flash.
Brandy says, “The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”
She says, “Don’t do what you want.” She says, “Do what you don’t want. Do what you’re trained not to want.”
It’s the opposite of following your bliss.
Brandy tells me, “Do the things that scare you the most.”
Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Fourteen
ou won’t catch Manus bowing down, making himself a slave to the golden calf of total accuracy. You, who are always trying to get everything “right,” he could teach you a thing or ten. For example: don’t be in such an all-fired hurry to get everything wrapped up.
Witness how Manus recounts the story of his all-time favorite movie: Billy Zane is riding a boat with Dolores Claiborne. Also aboard are Kate Winslet and that demented kid from Gilbert Grape. The lavish interiors are spectacular, but the exteriors make the boat look a little computer-generated—genuinely video-gamey—not that you could do much better. The boat, itself, wow, this boat is gigantic, plowing through the North Atlantic, escorted by leaping porpoises, but most of what you’ll notice is how much air pollution it generates. It’s as if the entire reason for this trip is to draw a fat line of coal smoke between Southampton and Ellis Island. Inside the grand salon, Billy Zane gives Kate Winslet a big blue diamond and slugs her in the chops. The kid from Gilbert Grape draws a naked picture of her boobs. This, this is just not Kate Winslet’s day! Finally, an iceberg takes a bite out of the boat’s hull, well below the waterline. It’s exactly like Jaws but in slow motion and with ice. This grand metaphor—it’s sinking fast. As the boat stands straight up in the water, panic ensues. This gesture mimics, strangely, the moment Kate Winslet stood on her tiptoes, ballerina-style, and fell down drunk. To save two thousand Irish people from drowning, Kate shoots Billy Zane and stuffs his corpse in the leak. Nobody sees that coming. At this point there’s still three days to kill before anyone will see the Statue of Liberty; most of the actors are playing a card game called “bridge.” Hereabouts, usually Manus gets up to use the bathroom or microwave a snack. When he comes back to watch, the boat is swarming with vampires. Sometimes Manus channel-surfs, splicing in the better parts of other films. Martians blast the boat with death rays. Charleton Heston tries to rescue Ava Gardner but is washed away to a martyr’s offscreen death. The kid from Gilbert Grape dies every time—BUT NEVER SOON ENOUGH.
As far as Manus is concerned, Bill Paxton should’ve made Aliens II and quit while he was ahead. Instead, Paxton finds the naked drawing of Kate Winslet locked in an underwater safe. This is not what he wanted. He wanted the big blue diamond that a littering old woman doesn’t think to recycle. She simply heaves it into the ocean, where human beings throw all their Styrofoam cups and used diapers. Bankrupt, Bill Paxton smiles at a skinny blond girl.
That . . . that’s the wonderful freedom you had when you were six years old, before you caved in to logic. You had authority but you forgot it. There is no truth. Not really. There’s only the best truth.
The happy ending is that, time and time again, Manus falls asleep.
Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Three
hen you go out with a drunk, you’ll notice how a drunk fills your glass so he can empty his own. As long as you’re drinking, drinking is okay. Two’s company. Drinking is fun. If there’s a bottle, even if your glass isn’t empty, a drunk, he’ll pour a little in your glass before he fills his own.
This only looks like generosity.
That Brandy Alexander, she’s always on me about plastic surgery. Why don’t I, you know, just look at what’s out there? With her chest siliconed, her hips liposucked, the 46-16-26 Katty Kathy hourglass thing she is, the fairy godmother makeover, my fair lady, Pygmalion thing she is, my brother back from the dead, Brandy Alexander is very invested in plastic surgery.
And vice versa.
Bathroom talk.
Brandy’s still laid out on the cold tile floor, high
atop Capitol Hill in Seattle. Mr. Parker has come and gone. Just Brandy and me all afternoon. I’m still sitting on the open end of a huge ceramic snail shell bolted to the wall. Trying to kill her in my half-assed way. Brandy’s auburn head of hair is between my feet. Lipsticks and Demerols, blushes and Percocet 5, Aubergine Dreams and Nembutal Sodium capsules are spread out all over the aquamarine countertops around the vanity sink.
My hand, I’ve been holding a handful of Valiums so long my palm has gone Tiffany’s light blue. Just Brandy and me all afternoon with the sun coming in at lower and lower angles through the big brass porthole windows.
“My waist,” Brandy says. The Plumbago mouth looks a little too blue, Tiffany’s light blue, if you ask me. Overdose baby blue. “Sofonda said I had to have a sixteen-inch waist,” Brandy says. “I said, ‘Miss Sofonda, I am big-boned. I am six feet tall. No way am I getting down to a sixteen-inch waistline.”
Sitting on the snail shell, I’m only half listening.
“Sofonda,” Brandy says, “Sofonda says, there’s a way, but I have to trust her. When I wake up in the recovery room, I’ll have a sixteen-inch waist.”
It’s not like I haven’t heard this story in a dozen other bathrooms. Another bottle off the countertop, Bilax capsules, I look it up in the Phyicians’ Desk Reference book.
Bilax capsules. A bowel evacuant.
Maybe I should drop a few of these into that nonstop mouth between my feet.
Jump to Manus watching me do that infomercial. We were so beautiful. Me with a face. Him not so full of conjugated estrogens.
I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long, long sex thing that could end at any moment because, after all, it’s just about getting off. Manus would close his power-blue eyes and twist his head just so, side to side, and swallow.
And, Yes, I’d tell Manus. I came right when he did.
Pillow talk.
Invisible Monsters Remix Page 13
