Something That May Shock and Discredit You

by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

  CHAPTER 13 Sir Gawain Just Wants to Leave Castle Make-Out

  Wherein I finally learn that leaving parties early, failing to cope, and pulling an Irish exit on first dates puts me in excellent literary company.

  KING ARTHUR: it’s Christmas so anyone who wants to come to my house and absolutely scream at me is entirely welcome to do so

  GREEN KNIGHT: hi hi hi, merry Christmas, look at my neck!

  (it’s green)

  (that’s not all of me that’s green ;) )

  come over

  it’ll be fun

  let’s cut each other’s heads off with swords or this axe

  GAWAIN: what

  GREEN KNIGHT: you can make out with my wife

  GAWAIN: sorry what

  GREEN KNIGHT: you can make out with me

  GAWAIN: what?

  GREEN KNIGHT: look just come over

  we’ll have dinner, with all of our heads on, and also wearing clothes

  you hit me today and I’ll hit you a year from now

  GAWAIN: it’s Christmas

  GREEN KNIGHT: fine

  hit me today and I’ll hit you next year the day after Christmas

  happy?

  GAWAIN: I don’t understand the rules of this game

  or the prize

  what is the goal here

  GREEN KNIGHT: are you going to cut my head off or what

  [GAWAIN cuts off the GREEN KNIGHT’s head]

  GREEN KNIGHT: fantastic, thank you

  see you in a year

  [The GREEN KNIGHT picks up his head and rides away]

  GAWAIN: oh my God

  KING ARTHUR: honestly

  my advice to you is to not even worry about this

  GUINEVERE: yeah

  do not take this seriously

  GAWAIN: but what will I do next year when it is his turn to—

  KING ARTHUR: look

  i just said that was my advice

  [One year later]

  GREEN KNIGHT: welcome to my castle, we’ve definitely never cut off each other’s heads before, my name is Bertilak and I am a regular human color, how are you

  GAWAIN: thank you for your hospitality, but I cannot stay long

  I have an appointment with a man at the Green Chapel in a few days

  GREEN KNIGHT: the Green Chapel is JUST down the road from here, probably

  you should just stay here until your appointment, stay here with me and my wife

  GAWAIN: very well, I accept

  GREEN KNIGHT: oh but shoot

  I have to go on a hunt, like right now

  so why don’t we just agree to play a game for as long as you’re staying here

  where I bring you whatever I find outside during the day

  and you bring me whatever you find in my own house during the day

  GAWAIN: what an odd suggestion

  why don’t I just come hunting with you instead?

  GREEN KNIGHT: NO

  no, you just stay here in the castle and give me whatever you find at the end of every day

  GAWAIN: but you already own everything in the castle, it’s yours

  GREEN KNIGHT: I WILL SEE YOU ON THE MORROW

  LADY BERTILAK: whatcha kissin’

  GAWAIN: hm?

  oh, nothing

  LADY BERTILAK: let’s make out

  GAWAIN: I don’t feel like we should do that

  LADY BERTILAK: if you don’t kiss me at least once it would really hurt my feelings

  GAWAIN: well

  if it would hurt your feelings

  LADY BERTILAK: fantastic, thank you!

  now you can make out with my husband tonight

  GREEN KNIGHT: GAWAIN

  I have brought you a deer from today’s hunt

  what do you have for me

  GAWAIN: I, uh

  I guess I have some kissing for you to have

  GREEN KNIGHT: sounds great

  [They kiss]

  okay, see you tomorrow

  GAWAIN: oh I really don’t want to play this game again, this is making me sort of unco—

  GREEN KNIGHT: tomorrow!!

  LADY BERTILAK: let’s have sex

  GAWAIN: Okay, no for two reasons

  first you are my host’s wife and that goes against every vow of knighthood ever

  and the second half is that then I would also have to have sex with your husband

  according to your weird castle sex game

  LADY BERTILAK: mm that sounds like a Gawain problem

  not a Lady Bertilak problem

  GAWAIN: well I’m not having sex with you

  LADY BERTILAK: fine

  here’s my underwear though, you have to take it

  otherwise it would be rude

  GAWAIN: well

  I don’t want to be rude

  excuse me, I have to go kiss your husband again

  GREEN KNIGHT: Well, Gawain,

  it’s been a great time here at Castle Make-Out

  but you’d probably better go fight that Green Knight you keep talking about

  GAWAIN: I will certainly perish when it is his turn to deliver the blow

  Farewell, friend

  GREEN KNIGHT: Gawain

  Gawain it was me the whole time

  GAWAIN: what

  GREEN KNIGHT: I’m the same guy, from before

  only I’m not gonna kill you

  I’m just gonna fuck up your neck a little because you kept my wife’s underwear and didn’t tell me

  but you’re all right, guy

  you’re all right

  GAWAIN: what the hell

  what the hell was the point of any of this

  why the hell did you set all this up for

  GREEN KNIGHT: :)

  GAWAIN: what the HELL

  KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE: henceforth we shall all wear green sashes

  to celebrate the valuable lesson we have learned this day

  GAWAIN: WHAT LESSON

  WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED

  KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE: :)

  Part II

  In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.… To be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do.

  —G. K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” Orthodoxy

  “Begad,” said the green knight, “Sir Gawain, I am pleased

  to find from thy fist the favor I asked for!”

  —Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by J. R. R. Tolkien

  It’s difficult not to read the Pearl Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight without envisioning a sort of Benny Hill–style montage of hot-potato sexual tension: Lady Bertilak chasing Sir Gawain around the castle trying to stuff girdles and rings in his pocket; Sir Gawain running full-tilt away from her with his fingers stuffed in his ears, listing women he’s disliked; Lord Bertilak throwing open a series of doors with a hopeful expression and making out with whoever’s behind them. The account the Green Knight gives of kissing, of giving kisses, of asking to be kissed, seemed as sound an account as any to me, who found the concept fascinating but the practice baffling and impenetrable. The best and strongest men in the world are all assembled together; who that loved men would not ride into that hall and beg one of them to cut off your head? And who has ever been injured by men and not been disappointed at the insufficiency of the wound afterward? Come over, but don’t stay over; look at me, but not like that; here, trade kisses with someone else who will act as my emissary—now what on earth did you go and
kiss her for?—the game of bodies and beheading made very little sense as a trans person who had no language for the way I experienced my body or the bodies of others, no way to explain that I could imagine myself as a girl and I could imagine myself being kissed if I worked hard enough at it, but never both at the same time. Welcome to my house, now you have to kiss both of us made as much sense as any other set of rules about kissing I’d ever been offered.

  The closest I could ever come to imagining a romantic interaction that would need to acknowledge the body was this: I would imagine myself at the local dairy where some of my friends had part-time jobs. A stranger would rush in and shoot me, wounding me mortally but not immediately killing me, then just as immediately depart. My friends would gather round in horror and pity, all wishing they had loved me better and admiring the beautiful, gallant way in which I prepared to meet death. I would say bravely that my final wish was not to die unkissed, and one of my friend’s boyfriends would solemnly and respectfully oblige; then I would die and the fantasy would restart, possibly with a new outfit. This had the benefit of infusing every hypothetical kiss with the urgency of the grave, while simultaneously freeing me from having to imagine what on earth might be expected of me after kissing, or worse, what asking to be kissed without the threat of death might look like. Had I had access to a phrase like “transmasculine resonance” at a younger age I might have found a certain transmasculine resonance in Sir Gawain trapped in somebody else’s house trying to avoid kisses from both men and women while worrying about unavoidable physical challenges and the threat of blood; as it was I instead developed a habit of leaving parties abruptly, usually after saying, “I’m going to the bathroom, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  When I was just teetering on the verge of puberty, between sixth and seventh grade (I say teetering but this was the midnineties and everyone was still drinking that bad milk with all the hormones in it instead of the healthful modern raw milk that sometimes kills you, so I probably had a solid two or three years of menstruation under my belt at that point) I spent a lot of time on the bus ride home from school listening to the classic-rock station. This was for two reasons; the first was that none of my friends were on my bus line until eighth grade, and the second was that I didn’t own a Walkman until high school. There were a couple of songs popular on the suburban Chicago classic-rock station that seemed designed to introduce a white eleven-year-old to the idea of the blues as gradually as possible: Melissa Etheridge’s “I’m the Only One,” Marc Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis,” and a smattering of Bonnie Raitt, all of which played on absolutely constant rotation. I was very preoccupied with the idea that I was never going to go on a date or be kissed, an idea I found both desolating and incredibly romantic, and they served as the ideal accompanying soundtrack for planning a sexy, sexless future. They turned out to be, in fact, relatively formative when it came to my idea of what sexy women sounded like and thought about. The best possible future I could envision for myself (while remaining realistic—it was one thing to imagine myself dying heroically at Oberweis Dairy while my friend Katie’s boyfriend honorably kissed me into the grave, but quite another to imagine myself trapped with a boyfriend of my own) looked a lot like soft-rock-infused yearning solitude. I could imagine myself as a grown woman only in total isolation from the rest of humanity, and believed the absolute sexiest thing a grown woman could be was “incredibly sad about Elvis,” just like Alannah Myles in “Black Velvet.”

  Perhaps it would have been better for me if I could have seen the movie Velvet Goldmine or heard of the Smiths at that age instead, and transitioned at fourteen. I might have called myself Trenton and had a cis boyfriend at fifteen; I might even today be five foot ten instead of five foot seven and a half inches tall. But I did not have access to Velvet Goldmine or the Smiths; I had access to Alannah Myles and Sir Gawain and church and was going to have to make do with what I had. By the time I did encounter Velvet Goldmine and the Smiths I had already developed various strategies of self-protection, and was mostly safe from becoming unbearable about them. I wanted male romantic attention very badly, and couldn’t stand it at the same time; I briefly had a boyfriend in college and spent almost every night of the week going over to his house, flirting outrageously with him, then sneaking out the window to avoid spending the night, feeling as I drove home every time that I had just pulled off the most marvelous escape, while simultaneously missing him already.

  The Green Knight on the ground now gets himself ready,

  leaning a little with the head he lays bare the flesh,

  and his locks long and lovely he lifts over his crown,

  letting the naked neck as was needed appear.

  His left foot on the floor before him placing,

  Gawain gripped on his ax, gathered and raised it,

  from aloft let it swiftly land where ’twas naked,

  so that the sharp of his blade shivered the bones,

  and sank clean through the clear fat and clove it asunder,

  and the blade of the bright steel then bit into the ground.

  The fair head to the floor fell from the shoulders,

  and folk fended it with their feet as forth it went rolling;

  the blood burst from the body, bright on the greenness,

  and yet neither faltered nor fell the fierce man at all,

  but stoutly he strode forth, still strong on his shanks,

  and roughly he reached out among the rows that stood there,

  caught up his comely head and quickly upraised it,

  and then hastened to his horse, laid hold of the bridle,

  stepped into stirrup-iron, and strode up aloft,

  his head by the hair in his hand holding;

  and he settled himself then in the saddle as firmly

  as if unharmed by mishap, though in the hall he might wear

  no head.

  His trunk he twisted round,

  that gruesome body that bled,

  and many fear then found,

  as soon as his speech was sped.

  To force a roomful of men to admire your ability to withstand physical pain and visibly bleeding ax wound—it may be that there is such a thing as too much transmasculine resonance, and better for me that I would not come to know of it for years and years. If you’re bewildered by that, boys, you should come visit my castle and meet my wife sometime!

  I don’t think it’s quite correct to say that I didn’t feel like transition was possible at all, much less for me, until I came to know trans men. It’s still less correct to say that I transitioned for trans men, not just because of them, and yet something about that statement seems true however much I might want to resist it. I don’t quite know how to acknowledge that truth without creating a separate, wholly sovereign category for trans men that can serve as lazy shorthand for “men, but good” or “men, but not really—well, yes of course, trans men are men! but not like that,” or, worst of all, “men, but safe, due to perceived dicklessness.” Anything that frames trans men as a sort of Skipper to cis men’s Barbie seems rooted more in wishful or even delusional thinking than in reality, and elfland never tolerates wishful thinking. But the point remains that my whole young life I carried around a great and a secret love for men I did not feel safe expressing to men, because they could not be trusted with the love I—foolishly, impulsively, unwillingly—had for them; when I began to know trans men later in my life, regardless of whether I found them variously attractive, boring, self-centered, passive-aggressive, badly dressed, charming, clingy, or rude, I was at last ready to set my love down and offer it, to name it with full confidence in the middle of a great hall. I’d been so in love with boys and never told any of them, and I was so ready to say so out loud, and so ashamed, I could burst.

  But not knowing my other options, Alannah Myles was the best kind of woman I could imagine myself becoming—too in love with a single dead boy to go out with any of the alive boys who might be interested in her, which seemed like a
pretty reasonable position for a grown woman to take, I thought as an eleven-year-old with two solid years of menstruation under his belt. I needed boys to leave me alone so that I could be properly alone with boys. Sexy women stood on porches wailing about Elvis and wearing full chaps over their jeans, and the most billowing white shirts imaginable; maybe someday I could be so sexy that men would pay attention to me but never get close enough to remind me that I had a body.

  It’s a genuinely great and, I think, truly funny song; the moment the music stops to reflect on just how sad it was that Elvis died—“In a flash he was gone—it happened so soon,” Myles sings, shaking her head mournfully and lapsing into a respectful silence. Elvis is DEAD and that’s why I can’t go out with you tonight. Of course, any eleven-year-old’s idea of what adult sexiness looks like is bound to be ridiculous. And there was something funny too, in being thirty years old and throwing a tantrum in my therapist’s office about how I didn’t want to want to be a boy because boys weren’t going to be nice to me. The rules of elfland are always bewildering, but that’s never stopped anyone from wandering in before.

  INTERLUDE XIII No One Understands Henry VIII Like I Do

  One of the biggest hypothetical problems when it comes to transitioning is that it really fouls up your time-travel fantasies, or at least muddles them for a good long while. (Another problem is whether to refer to transition as a sex change, which I’ve seen a handful of people do for a variety of reasons. There’s something pleasingly retro about it, but I’m not quite sure I’m tall enough to pull that style off. Transition it is, at least for now.) I’ve always felt particularly prepared for time travel, to be in a position where I would be forced to keep my head down, abandon my values for expediency, and say only things I knew other people wanted to hear in order to survive.