Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

“No,” Paul said. He pulled his labia apart to expose the shiny red skin, his clit, that extra slitted hole whose name he did not know.

  Jane, for once, had nothing to say.

  He extended his finger to Jane’s nose.

  “Does that smell like penis to you?”

  Jane sniffed his finger, frowning.

  Paul let his concentration lapse, let his clit expand back into cock, his hole close up into taint, his labia drop heavily into nutsack. Jane stared, still completely silent.

  “You can’t tell anybody,” he said. He patted his package through his briefs, then pulled his jeans back up.

  “Of course not,” said Jane. “If anyone finds out about this, you’ll be a total guinea pig.”

  Paul could practically see the gears turning in her head; she was getting excited about some thought she was having.

  “Yeah,” he said, emphatically. “And that would suck.”

  Paul walked out of his bedroom and rummaged in the refrigerator. He preferred to hang out at Jane’s house where there was food. He located a single can of Squirt, which he bought for the name. He held it up to Jane and she shook her head.

  “But I actually do want to go to Michigan in August,” he said. “Don’t you want to go with me now? We’ll have so much fun!”

  Jane picked up her backpack, heavy with library books she was taking home to keep unopened next to her bed for the next eight months.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “I don’t want to get my ass kicked by a gang of Indigo Girls-worshipping, softball-playing wo-per-daughters with mullets and fanny packs. They’re extremely particular about their ‘womon-only space.’ ”

  “We won’t get in trouble,” said Paul. “They’ll never know.”

  Jane looked over the top of her sunglasses. “Maybe,” she said.

  * * *

  ×

  Once upon a time there was a sweet darling young wolf who lived alone in the forest and loved pretty things. Now, this wolf was a strange wolf, quite small, maybe part coyote on his mother’s side, or maybe his father was a fox—no one knew. The pack had reared him after his mother died, as the pack does, but he knew they did not mind his absence, found him easier to miss than accommodate.

  Out on his own, the young wolf had been lonely at first but also happy to be in the center of such beauty. The wolf loved the little violets that grew in the grass, the dappled sunlight on soft pine needles, the sharp shiny icicles hanging from the trees, the little thatched cottage where the old human woman lived, maybe even the old human woman herself. He studied her every day, admiring her soft furless skin like fallen leaves, her silver and red hair so like his own handsome coat, her raspy bark, how she gestured delicately with her thin little paws. He watched her read her books by the fire, soak in her claw-foot tub, mate occasionally with a bad-smelling woodsman. What did she think about, he wondered. Why did she do the things she did?

  The young wolf struck up a camaraderie with an old fox who also lived near the cottage. Sometimes the old fox and the young wolf watched the human woman together, with no discussion. Did they love her? Want to eat her? The wolf didn’t know.

  One morning, having gone out of his way to avoid the nasty-smelling woodsman, the wolf found himself near the loud bland human path through the undergrowth. He snacked on a few blackberries here and there, and made one desultory pass at a too-quick rabbit as he wandered pleasurably through the undergrowth. As he neared the path, the wolf smelled something disturbing—human adolescent commingled with old milk, dead meat, smoke, and yeast. He could hear the blundering human sounds: crunching footsteps, a low song. He crept closer to look, and a child—really a maiden—passed. The maiden was a younger version of the old woman, a sort of pup, draped in a gorgeous expensive-seeming blood-red cloak. The wolf thought he might like to wear that cloak. He felt mysteriously compelled to reveal himself, but he did not know how to do so without frightening the human maiden and so stayed hidden. He consulted with his friend the fox.

  “Ah yes,” said the old fox. “Hmm. There is more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?”

  “I don’t know,” said the wolf, sadly. “I don’t know what I am.”

  The old fox smiled a dangerous toothy smile.

  “I will try to teach you,” he said. “You may learn; you may not.”

  After many days and nights, the young wolf did learn some small measure of the old fox’s teaching. When the maiden next came up the human path, the young wolf knew mostly what to do. He revealed himself, and when the maiden went still with fear, the young wolf pounced right into her, just like that. The young wolf stroked his furless soft hands, cuddled into the longed-for velvety red cloak, and set off, weak but tall, to meet his beloved old human woman.

  *

  First admission to self: at nine, after hearing Richie Spagnoletti call the music teacher Mr. Plummer a queer.

  First admission to another human being: freshman year of high school phone call to the Albany Crisis Hotline, while his parents were out to dinner and Ari was asleep.

  First admission to an actual friend: Heather Federson, senior year of high school.

  First gay tee shirt: a white shirt with the words ACT UP!, which he wore under his uniform button-downs the last month of high school. Or maybe the Keith Haring radiating baby shirt Heather Federson brought him back from her weekend in the city? One of the two.

  First gay book: A Boy’s Own Story, snuck-read in the Troy public library at age twelve.

  First gay friend: Justin Rosenblum, though Paul denied the friendship at the time to anyone who asked.

  First gay handjob received (abortive): from Justin Rosenblum, junior year of high school, in Justin Rosenblum’s bedroom with “Free Nelson Mandela” on the record player.

  First gay handjob given (prematurely concluded): to Justin Rosenblum, junior year of high school, also in Justin Rosenblum’s bedroom with “Free Nelson Mandela” on the record player.

  First (partial) blowjob received: from Justin Rosenblum, two weeks before Paul’s graduation, in the Rosenblum family’s poolhouse.

  First blowjob given: to Johnny Pallazola, summer after high school, after three years of Johnny gay-baiting Paul, in the woods at the end of the cul-de-sac where Paul lived.

  First ear piercing: left ear, silver hoop, first weekend at college, 1989.

  First gay kiss: Justin Rosenblum, Homecoming weekend visit to Paul at SUNY-Binghamton.

  Discovery of HQ76: first year of college, Bartle Library, Binghamton.

  First group of gay friends: at Binghamton, the motley gang of sincere, pimply, waxy-skinned boys and girls who’d gather giddily in each other’s dorm rooms for John Waters or Joan Crawford film fests.

  First Gay Pride Parade: New York, 1991.

  First official boyfriend: Tony Pinto, New York, July–August 1991.

  First anal sex given: to Tony Pinto, New York, August 1991.

  First anal sex received: from Tony Pinto, Iowa City, December 1991.

  II.

  Jane got them through the gates of the festival, though Paul totally could’ve. He wasn’t that nervous. They accepted their work crew assignments, happy not to pay for the ticket, and secure in the knowledge (which Jane had gleaned from her one-night stand with a girl from Toronto) that the cool people at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival were the workers.

  Paul had maybe overdone his outfit. He wore a heather-pink Farrah Fawcett tee shirt with the sleeves chopped off, black leather wristcuffs, cutoff Levi’s, a spiked belt, and engineer boots with striped tube socks stretching up his calves. His hair was Tatum O’Neal scruffy (Little Darlings era), he wore sunglasses, and he eschewed a bra, for dyke realness. He had heard from Jane (who had heard from the Toronto girl) that going topless was a thing at Michigan. He could go topless. He was feeling pretty liberated.r />
  “Do I look dykey enough?” he asked.

  “You’ll do,” said Jane, who had given herself a flapper haircut before they left and was currently lipsticking an extra-long cigarette holder as she leaned out the driver’s window of her hatchback. “Do I look like a tasty morsel for one of those hot San Francisco butches?”

  “Um,” said Paul. “Sure.”

  “Let’s find the ladies,” said Jane, parking.

  “Watch out, ladies,” said Paul, strapping on Jane’s backpack and hugging their two borrowed sleeping bags. “I am feeling very sex positive, very Gayle Rubin. I have a somewhat Persistent Desire.”

  “I love that you’re a big dyke now, Paul. I really do. But if you cramp my style I will out you so fast your head will spin.”

  “ ‘No political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real,’ ” said Paul.

  “Seriously?” said Jane, distracted by a flat-topped person with an armload of timber. “Ooh, looky!”

  Jane gripped the map they’d been given at check-in, and led Paul down a dirt path to a clearing.

  “Here,” she said, dropping tent and duffel and making small satisfied noises.

  Paul set himself to gathering kindling so he wouldn’t have to admit he didn’t know how to pitch a tent. He hadn’t been a Boy Scout. He rested a stack of twigs next to their duffels as Jane expertly erected the borrowed four-man tent.

  “Wow,” said Paul. “It’s palatial.”

  “I love camping,” said Jane, with alienating sincerity. She was sort of outdoorsy, Paul realized, as perhaps were all lesbians at heart. How was he going to pass for two entire weeks in the woods?

  “I have to pee,” he said. “I’m going to find a nice private ‘Porto-Jane.’ ”

  Jane gave a reassuring snort at Paul’s scare-quotes. She was still his friend; she wasn’t a Stepford lesbian just because they were at Michigan and she had all this secret knowledge of tents.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’m going to finish this up and explore for a bit. But I’ll meet you at the dinner thing.”

  “Please,” said Paul. “Come with me. I need an escort. It’s vegetarian!”

  “Just for tonight,” she said. “Then I am done babysitting you.”

  Paul set off. He saw a few clumps of people who mostly ignored him: hippies sporting Deadhead bandanas and patchouli he could smell from fifteen feet, two sensitive shaved-head punks in all black and Fluevogs, and some San Francisco types. Paul wasn’t used to being ignored, but he didn’t mind the opportunity to scope the scene. He walked around the skeletal paths, down the paved road (cutely called Lois Lane), past various tents with workers already busy inside. He and Jane didn’t have work shifts until the next day, and they were on different crews: Paul cooking and Jane working security in a scheme to meet butches. He wanted the lay of the land, as he always did, so he walked and walked, memorizing landmark trees.

  Back at the campsite, he found Jane deep in flirtation with Flat-Top.

  “This is Frog,” said Jane. “Frog, meet my friend—”

  “Polly,” said Paul quickly, unconvinced of Jane’s solidarity or memory. “Nice to meet you.”

  Frog, conveniently camped one site over and on Long Crew, led them to dinner, impressing Jane and boring Paul, who decided Jane was settling again. Why not look around a bit more? he thought. It’s a game preserve.

  Over bowls of lentils and brown rice, Frog explained the Michigan lore.

  “Y’all are called ‘Festival Virgins,’ ” said Frog.

  “Will we be hazed?” said Jane, coyly.

  “There may be hazing,” said Frog.

  Oh gross, thought Paul, and began to look around the area called the Fire Pit, where all the workers had assembled to eat. He saw the hippies and the sensitive punks from his earlier travels, and a raucous gang of obviously San Franciscan butches and extremely high femmes, but mostly he saw androgynous ’70s lesbians, surprisingly appealing in their labrys necklaces and Rosie the Riveter tee shirts. Paul felt like a time traveler, a tourist at a gay reenactment—Hidden-from-History Town.

  Frog introduced them to friends from Austin, too many to remember names. Paul was tired from the six-hour drive.

  “I’ve got to go to bed,” he said in Jane’s ear, as he’d seen girls do all his life. “You stay if you want.”

  “No, that’s good,” she whispered back. “I’m coming.”

  They said their goodbyes and walked back to their tent.

  “I’m whupped,” said Paul. He was glad it was so cold he could sleep in layers, and his own hair was almost as long as his girl hair, so even if someone surprised him in the night with his defenses down, they probably couldn’t see the difference.

  The next morning, Paul’s first big test was at hand: a work shift without Jane. He picked his way from their campsite to the kitchen tent, where he was set to the task of chopping potatoes and carrots for an epic vegetarian stew. The tent reminded him of catering jobs he’d worked at the Troy Golf Club, shucking corn and eyeing caddies. Except the music was better, because somebody had a boom box and was playing L7.

  “I love L7,” Paul said. Dykes were so cool. What could be more punk than being a dyke? What better way to say fuck you to the Man?

  A tall butch in a railroad engineer’s cap and two full sleeves of Vargas girls tattoos exhaled derisive air in Paul’s direction and hefted a twenty-five-gallon plastic tub of tahini on the metal worktable. Her partner in hummus—smaller, equally tattooed, and mohawked—chopped garlic furiously and muttered something about Seattle poseurs. Paul realized his mistake immediately.

  “I mean, I love L7’s old stuff, before they got all big. I’m more into the Sub Pop days, you know?”

  Team Hummus gave Paul the collective stinkeye and he decided that silence might be the better part of valor. He purposefully turned back to his potatoes, trying to chop in the most dykey way. Everyone else in the kitchen cut their vegetables so confidently. Paul looked at Sheela, the crew leader, for reassurance that his potatoes were small enough. Sheela was kind, an old-timey lesbian who lived year round on women’s land outside Santa Cruz, belonged to the Long Crew, and liked to “nourish all the beautiful women who made the festival what it was,” as she’d helpfully explained to new dyke Paul when he first showed up at the tent. Sheela gave a supportive thumb’s-up to Paul’s potatoes on her way to the pantry.

  Paul did a quick nervous body check, under cover of patting down his apron; he hadn’t been paying attention, and everything had stayed in place. He was getting good at this.

  “You done already? You’re a good little worker bee.”

  Sheela set a ten-pound bag of carrots in front of Paul.

  “Same size as the taters,” she said cheerfully.

  The Hummus Butches disappeared out to the Fire Pit for a smoke, and Sheela popped a Phranc tape in the box.

  “This is more my speed,” she said, winking at Paul, who felt a brief surge of pleasure at being included.

  A brown-haired girl who’d been washing dishes the whole time walked over from the sinks, drying her hands on her pants, and checked something off on an official-looking clipboard.

  “I actually like L7 too,” she said. “Don’t let them intimidate you.”

  “Thanks,” said Paul, pleased to be rescued, to be thought in need of rescue. “I’m Polly.”

  “Diane,” said the girl. “Is this your first time here?”

  “Yeah,” said Paul. “Pretty obvious, I guess.”

  “No, I mean, it’s mine too,” said Diane. “I just came because my friend was coming, but I like it so far.”

  Paul wondered if she was flirting with him. She was pretty, bigger than the waifs of all genders he often noticed first. She had greasy dark brown hair hanging in her eyes and wore an A-shir
t (which Paul had just learned not to call a wife beater), threadbare black workpants, and boots. Diane was road-tripping from Olympia. She’d just graduated from Evergreen (like Kathleen Hanna, Paul thought), where she’d done a concentration in visual arts/sculpture, focusing on ceramics. She didn’t know where she lived. Everything she owned was in her car, and she’d come to the festival as a last hurrah with a bunch of her friends from Olympia, including her best friend Zoe, who’d gone on the prowl and left her.

  “Oh, that sucks,” said Paul, experimenting with the idea that being left by your friend in a crowd of strangers would be a bad thing.

  “Right?” said Diane.

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure my friend ditched me too,” Paul said.

  “Then we’ll just have to hang out,” said Diane, and Paul felt a flutter of shyness, a shy girl flutter, the flutter of not knowing if he was making a friend or something else. This was a strange experience for him, for whom all were prey, and he located the feeling in his new body. He was now having girl-feelings. Weird.

  * * *

  ×

  After they cleaned up from the dinner rush, Sheela released them into the evening.

  “You gals go have a good time now!” she said, as Paul and Diane tumbled out of the kitchen tent and realized eight hours had passed. They stood and looked at each other for a moment in the woodsmoke dusk. Outside, workers from Sec/Comm, Front Gate, DART—all the other crews—reclined in various states of exhaustion, flirtation, and sisterhood.

  “Do you want to maybe go for a walk in the woods?” said Diane.

  Paul thought for a moment, and was startled to discover that he indeed did want to go for a walk in the woods. He hadn’t been near any woods since high school, when he’d convince Justin Rosenblum to head as far away from school as possible during free periods so no one would see ambiguous Paul talking to the known fag. Poor Justin, thought Paul, and suppressed a nameless something which threatened to bloom into guilt.

  Paul followed Diane past the crowds. She was sort of an in-charge person, he realized, but not bossy. She led him down to the place where the official trod-down paths ended and into what Paul couldn’t help but consider the wilderness.