How Many Degrees of Separation?

Today I went for a ride with Barbara and Sue, my sometime riding buddies.  I first started riding with them during my second year of living as Justine.  I met them, ironically enough, through the now ex-wife of  a guy with whom I used to ride "back in the day."


Funny how "back in the day" is--in terms of my own life, not to mention the greater continuum of time--not so long ago, really.  About ten years ago I was riding with Sheldon and a few of  his friends on some days, and on others I was riding with Mark, the husband of Carolyn, who introduced me to Barbara and Sue.  A few months ago, I learned, Carolyn left Mark because of another woman.  And Carolyn is the reason why Mark's first ex-wife left him.


All right:  I'm not going to write an expose on the secret lives of cyclists or some such thing.  Mark and a few other men I know give lie to a rumor that circulates every ten years or so:  that cycling causes male impotency.     If anything, it makes real men out of would-be men.  I know:  After all, as they say, it takes a real man to be a tranny.  Or, at least, it takes balls to be a woman.


Anyway...Barbara, Sue toand I rode from the Brooklyn Bridge Plaza out to the Canarsie Pier, by way of Ozone Park.  Yes, that way is not "as the crow flies."  But none of us were crows the last time I looked.


The Canarsie Pier itself offers quite the panoramic view of Jamaica Bay as it opens out to the ocean to the east and toward Breezy Point, Coney Island and Sandy Hook, New Jersey to the west and southwest.  You can forget that you're in Brooklyn, or any other part of New York City when you're on the pier--and looking toward the water.  Only a few hundred yards in back of the pier is the Belt Parkway and, on the other side of it, Rockaway Parkway and the neighborhood for which the pier is named.  And, near the entrance to the pier is one of those buildings that really looks like an oversized gazebo and is found on boardwalks.  Hot dog stands and such usually operate from such edifices, but the one on Canarsie Pier looks as if it's been vacant for about ten years.    At least I don't go to the pier for the architecture.


I sent Barbara and Sue on their way from the pier.  Actually, Barbara had to go to some family function and Sue had her business to take care of, and I didn't want to keep them. Plus, I wanted to spend some time on the pier, to which I used to ride at least a couple dozen times a year but hadn't seen since well before my surgery.


The first time I went to the pier was about twenty-five years ago.  I rode there with Mike and Gregory, with whom I worked at American Youth Hostels.  Gregory had lived in Canarsie all of his life and could recall when truck farms near the pier supplied stores and restaurants in the city.  He also took me on the one and only sea kayak ride I've ever experienced.  It's something I'd do again; I haven't only because I haven't had a friend or even riding buddy who has a kayak and access to a launch since I lost touch with Gregory.


As for Mike...I wonder whether or not he's alive.  I hadn't thought about him or Gregory for a long time until now.  Gregory was about ten years older than me; Mike was about my parents' age.  The last time I saw him, he was not much older than I am now. Last I heard--about ten years ago--he was on dialysis.  I heard about it from Holly, who worked with us in those days and whom I didn't see for about fifteen years until I bumped into her in a bookstore on the Upper West Side.  I have absolutely no idea of where she is now.  


I once introduced her to Morris, whom I met while working at AYH.  After they split up, Holly declared herself to be a lesbian.  Of course, there is absolutely no cause-and-effect relationship there! Still, I have made no attempt to be a matchmaker since then.  


It's really odd to think about those times.  I did a lot of things I enjoyed, and I did them with people whose company I enjoyed.  But I was still dreadfully unhappy.   It got to a point that I would warn people who wanted to develop friendships or other kinds of relationships with me that no matter what they did, they couldn't make me happy, so they shouldn't even try.  


I will probably never see any of those people again.  It's probably just as well:  Resuming friendships, much less love relationships, after a long hiatus has never worked for me.   I guess people never can do things they did "back in the day."  Or, at least, they can't do those things in the same way, with the same people as they did the first time around.  Then again, they may not want to.  I wouldn't, simply because of the price that my past extracted from me--and, sometimes, from the people who were involved in it.  


After I sent Barbara and Sue on their way, I sat on a wooden bench on Canarsie Pier, among fathers and sons who cast hooks and lines or cages with chicken necks inside them, and among the young lovers and old reminiscers.  None of them know me now; none knew me "back in the day."  I am happy for that.

A Familiar Shore In A New Life

Probably no cinematic scene is more emblazoned in my consciousness than the one that ends Le Quatre Cents Coups, a.k.a. The 400 Blows. Antoine Doinel, a boy of about twelve years old, lives in a dysfunctional home (to put it mildly!) and spirals downward from schoolboy mischief to petty crime in the neighborhood near Le Moulin Rouge. At various points in the film, he says he wants to see the ocean. After he is arrested, his mother asks whether he could be sent to a seaside reform school. Of course, the truant officer is none too willing to oblige; he says something to the effect that he wasn't running a resort.

Anyway, he's sent to a kind of military school where, during a football game, he escapes and keeps on running until he reaches the sea. When his feet touch the water, he turns his head and his face fills with an expression that has probably been interpreted in more ways than any other facial expression save for the Mona Lisa's. It's a combination of relief, release, conquest and a sense of what Yeats meant by "a terrible beauty is born."

Now, I'm not sure that whatever expression I wore today on the Coney Island Pier is nearly as enigmatic or interesting as Antoine's. But I'm sure I must have shown some of the sense of release--I could feel it--and what I like to call a sense of Zen ecstasy. And, of course, I've been to the ocean many times before. But this is the first time I've ridden my bike there in more than six months.

It was cold, but not terribly so, and there was no wind or precipitation. And the almost pristinely clear sky was almost too bright for reflections: The sun and the clear sky actually seemed to light the water from within, so that the waves flickered like nearly translucent lapis lazuli flames. Even though the air was chilly and the water, I'm sure, was very cold, I felt those colors and the refulgence of the sun glowing within me.

A new life, or a new stage in one's life, is often referred to as a new (and distant) shore. I wonder whether anyone ever thinks about reaching a familiar shore in a new life. Actually, I think that's part of what Zen teaches.

I'm thinking now about a day very early in my life as Justine. I rode my bike to the Coney Island boardwalk, as I did today. And I had a flashback to myself on a beach one Sunday in October during my senior year of high school. It amazes me now that more kids don't run away from home or do even more reckless things at that time in their lives: The pressure of expectations is so great even for a kid who's not struggling with his or her gender identity or sexuality. That tug-of-war between what parents, teachers and other adults want a kid to do and what that kid might actually want to do exacerbates, and is exacerbated by, the tension between the sort of person the kid wants to be, or realizes he or she is, and what the parents and other adults hope for. In my case, it meant that I would apply to West Point and Annapolis because my father and some other adults in my life wanted me to become a military officer. I think women were admitted to those academies the year after I applied to them, and at that time, the number of female officers was probably smaller than the number of male women's studies professors. So, of course, being a military officer would mean living very much as a man.

Anyway, on that long-ago day, I could only see more of the same struggles. In other words, I was seeing what I now call the Eternal Present: Everything ahead of you is just another version of what's in front of you. So, while I could apply to colleges and make plans to prepare myself to become an officer or a doctor or whatever, I simply could not envision the person who would be whatever I was supposed to become at the end of that training. What others dreamt for me was invariably predicated on my becoming a man, or at least their idea of what a man is. And, of course, that is exactly what I couldn't be even if I'd wanted to.

So today's bike ride brought me back to a place where I'd struggled, and first began to reconcile with that battle. In other words, it brought me to a familiar shore in a new life. At least now I can hope the familiarity is a blessing, or at least an advantage. If nothing else, it made me happy, if tired.