Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  One of these grateful classmates, a crook-nosed skater boy named Dallas, dropped a folded-up piece of paper onto Paul’s chair-desk. Paul unfolded the paper to discover a tab of Alice in Wonderland–themed windowpane. Dallas winked and tucked a similar square of paper under his own tongue, washed it down with beer, and leaned back. He kicked his extra-long legs out so his checkerboard Vans hit Paul’s boot. Paul moved his boot very slightly, to see what Dallas would do. Nothing.

  Why me? Paul wondered, gumming the paper, which tasted like sparkles—a placebo effect? He didn’t know Dallas, but had seen him at Gabe’s, at punk shows, at the Kum & Go on East Burlington microwaving cheeseburgers after the bars closed. Paul sat back and let the movie wash over him, a thin umbilical thread of acid connecting him to the skater.

  Divine was actually divine, Paul thought reverently. An angry goddess. Filth was divine, not filth. Paul stared at the screen and the perfect gray carpet and at Dallas, who was marveling at his own wrists.

  After Divine ate the dog shit, Dallas indicated that Paul should come with him, by which time Paul was in no position to disagree. They walked down to the river and followed it north, scouting for the rabbits who lived along the banks.

  “White rabbits,” Paul said.

  “Rabbit holes,” said Dallas.

  “Holy rabbit,” Paul said, and they had to sit down for a few weeks to laugh properly.

  Night got cold. Paul rubbed his bare arms up and down many times.

  “What do we do?” said Paul.

  “I have beer in the place where I live,” said Dallas, with some effort.

  They left the lit-up riverbank, snaked through campus to Greek Row. Dallas lived in an efficiency near the frat houses, handy for selling dime bags and shrooms.

  Inside his apartment, they drank many beers quickly because they were thirsty and because the alcohol didn’t affect them.

  “The trip is shielding us,” said Paul. “We are magic.”

  “We can’t get drunk,” said Dallas.

  Dallas had jerry-rigged a loft bed like a pillow fort. They sprawled underneath on a beige pleather El Camino bench seat, listening to CDs. Dallas was from Texas, and because of this, Dallas said, he had a lot of Tennessee Ernie Ford and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Paul took mental notes.

  “Dude,” said Dallas. “That movie.”

  “Right?”

  “Might be cool to have both, though,” Dallas said. “You know, to play with both.”

  They both thought quietly. Paul forgot to breathe. He was forming an idea, somewhat slowly.

  “You ever play with both?”

  “Naw,” said Dallas, pressing buttons on the CD player. “Hey, listen to this song.”

  Paul listened. And while he was listening he stood with his back to Dallas, ostensibly admiring Dallas’s CDs.

  “This is a true song. I feel easy like a Sunday morning.”

  “Yeah,” said Dallas. “And you know what, it’s like—it’s like better than the original.”

  “Totally,” Paul said. “But it would have been even better if a woman covered it. The best cover songs fuck with gender—like a woman singing lyrics by a man.”

  Dallas nodded sagely. Paul thought for a moment.

  “Sometimes these lyrics contain no explicit gender markers, but in such cases the paratext delivers the thrill. Who can hear Marianne Faithfull singing ‘As Tears Go By’ without thinking of her also inhabiting Mick Jagger’s louche hip-first lean, or Belly’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’ without an amusing vision of Tom Jones’s beefy confused face?”

  Dallas giggled with delight, like a little kid.

  “Let’s face it,” Paul continued. “There really isn’t anything unusual about Tom Jones’s heteronormative male gaze or his whine of dudely entitlement. Tanya Donelly reinvigorates Jones’s familiar words, posits an actually unusual expression of desire: a girl’s desire—possibly, probably even, queer.”

  “Yeah,” said Dallas, suddenly very serious. “Exactly.”

  “Some covers deliver the age-old simple pleasures of drag—knowledge, the opportunity to investigate the simulacra and make comparisons, that obscure little frisson of dissonance. Take Joan Baez singing ‘Virgil Caine is my name…like my father before me, I’m a working man’ (which, of course, is originally from the Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’) or Cait O’Riordan from the Pogues crooning, ‘My name is Jock Stewart, I’m a canny gun man’ (from the traditional ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day’). Joan Baez’s contralto can, if you squint your ears, pass as a farmboy tenor; Cait O’Riordan’s chalky delivery might be that of a rich ponce.”

  Paul rubbed his jaw professorially.

  “You look like our TA right now,” said Dallas.

  “Think about it,” said Paul. “When women cover songs by men, they don’t swap the pronouns. Is this a.) a lack of anxiety about convention, b.) a biologically essential fluidity native to humans with vaginas and/or two X chromosomes, c.) rampant queerness among women singers, or d.) the universal male default?”

  “Um, C?” said Dallas.

  “Yes!” Paul cried. “It is all that and more. Usually the gender reversal of the singer deliciously implies queer desire, as in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Dear Prudence,’ The Slits’ ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ Joan Jett’s ‘Crimson and Clover,’ Everything But The Girl’s ‘Alison,’ or Patti Smith’s ‘Gloria,’ in which her seductive gutterpunk vocals make the Van Morrison original sound as played-out as the locker-room boasts of a high-school football star.”

  Paul swigged from his empty beer can, and Dallas helpfully handed him another.

  “Some covers are queerer than others, approach jouissance, like the Raincoats’ mesmerizing cover of the Kinks’ ‘Lola’ in which a tranny-chaser’s admirably bold declaration of desire pales in its subversion next to the Raincoats’ queer-on-queer fantasia of a slightly neurotic but fairly confident British butch picking up a sexy and significantly taller femme. In Suzi Quatro’s bouncy ‘Born to Run,’ Springsteen’s working-class lament becomes a queer kid’s lusty paean to the joy of getting out of town with a dollop of conquest, persuading the closeted Wendy to come out. But more rarely, a man-type person might cover a song made famous by a woman-type person. Sometimes metal guys—like Megadeth’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ’—or grunge bands—like Nirvana’s ‘Molly’s Lips’—do covers of girl songs, but mostly these man-type people are super-queer countertenors, you know, Klaus Nomi, Neil Tennant, Jimmy Somerville, Marc Almond, who channel Motown divas or bubblegum pop stars. In these songs, the payoff is always in the uncanny, the repetition-with-a-difference, the photorealism, the trompe l’oeil.”

  Paul paced the room as he’d seen their TA do. He wished he had a chalkboard; he was worried Dallas might miss crucial points.

  “Some covers offer even more esoteric delights, for specialists. For instance, in Jayne County’s ‘I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night,’ a portion of pleasure comes from knowing that Jayne recorded the Electric Prunes’—an American band with a British Invasion sound—classic as Wayne County, before undergoing a sex change. In the case of the Vaselines’ cover of Divine’s ‘You Think You’re a Man, But You’re Only a Boy,’ the pleasure comes in the form of relief, of danger averted—in the first verse, upon hearing Frances McKee singing Divine’s ‘you weren’t man enough to satisfy me’ one naturally worries that one is encountering the beautiful lie of heteronormativity, until Eugene Kelly comes in on the second verse, after the bridge, sounding for all the world like a Scottish Fred Schneider, singing ‘you weren’t man enough to satisfy me’ against a Casio beat. So now we have a woman declaring her dissatisfaction with a man’s gender performance—or perhaps even delineating a gender difference between ‘man’ and ‘boy’?—and a man implying it would have been possible for another man to satisfy him. Certainl
y the implication here is that all gender is performance—a pure Butlerian moment. Or consider Cyndi Lauper’s ‘When You Were Mine,’ which becomes the lament of a girl who’d been fooling around with a straight friend, wanting more, that old familiar sucker, but which of course has its origin in Prince, a lavender menace in his own right. And then again, sometimes the most obviously queer songs—like Pansy Division’s ‘Smells Like Queer Spirit’—which detourn Nirvana—or Phranc’s ‘Gertrude Stein,’ a play on Jonathan Richman’s ‘Pablo Picasso’—offer only anthemic live-show rewards: oh, look, we all love this funny reversal! We’re all so queer! Let’s go hook up in the bathroom!”

  Paul glanced at Dallas, whose eyes were bright with awe.

  “Yes, Dallas, it’s true—maybe covers are particular to rock, by which I mean alternative and punk. Other genres use other words and maybe also mean something different: jazz vocalists or musical theater stars perform ‘standards’ or ‘medleys,’ and folk and country singers refer to ‘traditional’ songs in their liner notes, so cozy in their unassailable white straightness and not as concerned with originality or authenticity as those anxious thieving rockers. What about hip hop’s obsession with sampling? Take Arrested Development’s ‘Everyday People,’ how Speech sings Sly and the Family Stone so sweetly—almost a cover, but somehow more artistic. Hip hop uses samples as material from which to make art, whereas rock uses covers to foreground identity, performance itself the art. And of course sometimes a cover turns out not to be a cover, like PJ Harvey’s ‘O Stella,’ which I always thought must be a cleverly feminist take on a song traditionally sung by a man, but which the liner notes reveal to have been written by Polly Jean herself. A perfect Baudrillardian copy without an original, blissfully free of lineage…”

  Paul was suddenly very tired. He sat down next to Dallas and the two gazed companionably at Dallas’s enormous Jimi Hendrix poster.

  “Dude,” said Dallas.

  Paul walked over to the CD player and cued up “Easy” again, hitting auto-repeat for good measure.

  “Hey, you want to see something?” Paul put his body in Dallas’s way, lifted Dallas’s hands to his new breasts.

  “Whoa,” said Dallas. “Whoa! Those weren’t there.”

  Paul made his dick tiny. Tiny and hard. Dallas fondled Paul’s breasts.

  “Is your name really Dallas?” said Paul.

  “What?” said Dallas.

  “Do you want to see something else?” Paul said, grinding his crotch into the skater’s hand. Dallas unzipped Paul’s cords and cupped his very small erection. My little tater tot, thought Paul fondly. He was leveling off. He drank from a nearby can of beer as Dallas swallowed his dick and balls at the same time. After he spurted on the skater’s shoulder, he let his breasts melt away and his dick relax to its proper size as the skater watched.

  “What—” said Dallas.

  Paul zipped up and cleverly took the CD player off repeat.

  “That was a good song,” said Paul. “I should probably head.”

  “You can crash,” muttered Dallas, nodding chin to chest just like Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy. “This acid is intense.”

  “I’m cool,” said Paul. By the time he got to the door, Dallas was asleep sitting up. Paul stopped by the QuikTrip and bought three microwave burritos, which he ate cold walking home.

  The next afternoon in class, Dallas sat in his usual seat by the door, not near Paul. He gave Paul a polite two-fingered salute and a tight little smile. Paul tried to wave back butchly but Dallas had busied himself sketching Celtic flash in a notebook.

  It never happened, Paul thought. Nothing happened. And then under that, parenthetically, he thought, I am a fucking idiot, and Crying Game. Dallas might be a drug-dealing skateboard punk rocker right now, but at heart he was an American, at heart he was a normal straight boy. He’d cover all his tattoos with a suit at his Texas wedding. Paul wouldn’t even be invited. Paul was repulsive, apart from the human flow of life; Paul was sitting alone outside waiting for a ride that would never come.

  He decided not to take any more chances ever again. Ever. He wasn’t ready for the obvious question that so far no one had had the opportunity to ask in the sober daylight. What was he? Even a film major knew that matter can’t be created or destroyed. When he grew breasts, the matter must come from somewhere. When his penis went away, where did it go? Or was it all an illusion, something he could make people see? Could he get pregnant, and, if so, in which body? Could he change the baby? What if he got stuck? Could he turn himself into a tiger or a dolphin? Breathe underwater? How tall could he get—six feet, ten feet? Could he cover his body in hair, give himself a third eye?

  “Paul,” said the long-haired TA. “Thoughts on the Irigaray we read for today?”

  “Sorry,” said Paul. “What?”

  * * *

  ×

  A few miles away from a great state forest there lived a poor bookkeeper with his wife and her two small twins, whom the bookkeeper had adopted. The one’s name was Paul and the other’s name was Polly. The family had little to eat and no basic cable and then the bookkeeper was laid off. Although the twins qualified for free lunch and milk at school, the bookkeeper and his wife had little food to give them at night or on the weekends.

  One evening as he was lying in bed worrying, the bookkeeper sighed and said to his wife, “What is to become of us?”

  The bookkeeper’s wife said, “If you don’t get a new job, how will we pay the landlord? How will we feed the children?”

  The bookkeeper replied, “In the morning, we will take the children to the forest and let them practice their scouting skills. They are not very good scouts, and will probably not find their way home, and we will not have to feed them.”

  “We must not do that,” said the bookkeeper’s wife. “We should probably not do that.”

  In the dark before dawn, the bookkeeper’s wife awoke Paul first. She pressed a sharp pocketknife and a compass into his small hands.

  “I have always loved you best, my second-born,” she said. “You must come home to me.”

  Paul began to cry, although he did not understand his mother’s words. He watched her wake his twin, who did not make a sound as their mother dressed her in the beige Brownies uniform jumper and striped blouse with Peter Pan collar and stylish orange ascot, which Paul always wanted to wear and was never allowed to, even though the siblings were the exact same size. He looked at his own outfit, the drab blue Cub Scout shirt and trousers, the garish yellow neckerchief, and he cried louder.

  “Be quiet, Paul,” said Polly, when their mother had left their bedroom. “You know how they are. You will only set them off and then we will have no breakfast.”

  The bookkeeper and his wife bundled the twins into their Chevy Nova. Paul turned around to watch the ranch house disappear out the back window.

  “Turn around, Paul,” said the bookkeeper. “What are you staring at?”

  “My cat,” said Paul. “She is standing on our roof. I think she is trying to tell me something.”

  “Cats do not talk with humans,” said the bookkeeper’s wife. “You are too old for that kind of nonsense.”

  The bookkeeper and his wife drove the twins to the state forest. When they arrived at the parking area, the bookkeeper told the twins to get out.

  “We will meet you there after we park the car,” he said. “Just follow the path as you learned to do in Scouts.”

  The bookkeeper’s wife gave each of the children a peanut butter and grape jelly on Wonder Bread sandwich in wax paper, saying, “Save this for lunch, for this is the last of our peanut butter and the last of our grape jelly.”

  “Goodbye,” said the bookkeeper. “I mean, we will be right behind you.”

  Paul and Polly walked down the first path they saw, deep into the state forest.

  Paul wept quietly as they
walked, looking at the blue and red blazes on Polly’s Pro Keds through his tears.

  Polly led Paul confidently through the state forest. They walked and walked, without talking. Paul thought he might have seen a particular tree more than once, but he said nothing. After a long time, they reached a clearing in the middle of the pines.

  “Sister,” said Paul. “Let us rest here; our feet hurt and perhaps our parents will find us if we stay in one place.”

  “Very well, brother,” said Polly. “Look, I have matches. We shall light a campfire, as I learned to do in Brownies and you will learn to do in Cub Scouts someday if you pay attention.”

  Paul gathered a bouquet of small pretty sticks and flowers while Polly made a ring of stones and piled thick branches high in the middle. She lit the fire, and they leaned next to each other against a bench of fallen tree trunk.

  The children ate their sandwiches.

  “We must beware of wolves,” said Polly. “Wolves would like to eat us.”

  “Where are our parents?” said Paul. He fingered the pocketknife their mother had given him.

  “We have been abandoned,” said Polly. “We are unloved. It is just as well.”

  They heard a noise, which they thought might be their parents. Instead, a pair of hikers passed by their clearing.

  “Are you children lost?” asked one of the hikers.

  “We are not lost,” said Paul. “Our parents are on their way to meet us. They are right behind you.”

  The hikers were satisfied and walked on.

  “Why did you say that?” said Polly. “That was our chance to get away.”

  “Our parents are coming,” said Paul. “They must have gotten lost in the forest as we did. I am sure they will find us shortly if we only stay here.”

  The children gathered more firewood as the sky darkened.

  “Let us sleep here, then hitchhike to Grandmother’s house in the morning,” said Polly. “Grandmother will bake us cookies.”