J'Accuse

Here is another part of the work of fiction I've been writing:  

J’Accuse

One thing I’ve noticed since I left this block:  all of the sentences that began with “You aren’t…,”  “You can’t…” or “You are not to..” have been replaced with ones that begin, “Why do you want to…”

I’m thinking of Vivian again.  Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me now:  it’s been... how long?  Last I heard, she wasn’t living far from here.  Not that she ever did, or would do otherwise.

Near here.  With or without a man.  Or a woman, perhaps. Then I probably wouldn’t recognize her.  No, she wouldn’t recognize her as she was when she drove me through her old seaside town, not so far from here.  Or as she or I was on the morning when I first woke with her, when for the first time since early in my childhood I wasn’t thinking about a cup of coffee, a drink or breakfast. Or any other drug, for that matter.

Until that moment, my body’d never caught up to my mind, or at least the rages, fears and other waves that swirled behind my eyes and ears.  The spirit had been ready, so to speak, but not the flesh.  But on the morning, my body craved, for the first time I remember, the touch of another.  My pores had opened, throbbing like buds after the first April rainstorm.

And her gaze:  It stunned me, even blinded me temporarily.  Twinges of needles, glancing without piercing—and I wanted more, because she could open me, if only for a moment, without rending.

For the first time, I felt—or at least relished the illusion—that someone’d taken from me exactly what I’d taken from her:  whatever we could absorb through our mouths, through our skins.  Of course we began and ended through our orifices; one of us, as it turned out, sweeter than the other, more bitter than the other.  She, always a woman, on my tongue; I, becoming a woman—or so I thought—between her lips.

And through those hours, those days of chatting before that first night; the hours that followed; the days when I loved, when she loved:  her supple touch.  I, the supple touch, like the steady wind against her curtains:  I turned to waves as cool as her linens against my skin.

No man could’ve loved me that way, I thought: no man could be loved so.  That word I’d always swirled around, like sand around those mounds where boys believed they’d built castles, all dissipated in waves and wind.  Boys rise, men fall; Vivian and I lay facing each other, her eyes opening to my gaze.

I knew I wasn’t going to die and go to heaven.  I’d always known that.  There was always another day, whether I wanted it or not.  After what, it didn’t matter; there was always the day, the night, they year after.  No way out of it, no way to fight—but on that day there was no need to fight, at least some things. Later she’d tell me it was the first gentle night she spent with a man.  Was that the same as telling me I was the first gentle man she’d met?  I know that’s something I’d’ve never been, not for her or anybody else. 

On that night, I merely did what I’d done ever since a man—another one who disappeared from this block—pushed his pants down from his waist and pulled my face toward his crotch.  There was no way out of the moment, which lasted an eternity; there was only the moment; there would never be any other. There was only him; there was only her; there would be this moment, consisting of women.  And no way to leave it, even if I’d wanted to.

There was one major difference between that moment with Vivian and the others that preceded it: I’d had no urge to resist, to flee or even to protest. I could only accept her, in that particle of time, in the others that flew away from it:  only me, only her, and no other force in the universe.

If she’d understood that I simply acted as I always had up to that moment, would she’ve declared that I was the first, the only, man for her even as I wrapped my body—at that moment clad in a black lace bra and panties—in her kimono and shuffled into the kitchen where I boiled water for coffee and the sun flooded the window?  Well, if I was savoring an illusion, who’s to say that she wasn’t, too?

So, her question—her plea, her accusation—“How could you…” when I started taking hormones, when I talked about surgery, seems inevitable now, even—especially—had she seen me, or I her.

Something else I hadn’t realized then:  the moment someone exclaims, “How could you!” it’s a sure sign you’ve survived, or at least progressed in some way, however small.  The moment you’re not a subject—which is not necessarily the moment you cease to submit, if you ever do—someone somewhere feels betrayed.  Actually, it takes only a moment of happiness, or at least equanimity, to make someone believe you’ve taken it from him or her.  Look at all those parents who resent, overtly or covertly, their children’s success—which for most children, for most people, means nothing more than getting what they want.  The son dreams of moving to a penthouse in the city; the father wants him to take over the family’s hardware store and father his grandchildren. And girls inspire jealousy in mothers who’ve stopped sleeping in the same beds with their husbands but have no desire to sleep with any other man.   They’d sit shiva; they’ll schedule exorcisms (or psychotherapy, which is usually the same thing) for daughters who realize they’ll find love, in all its glory and cruelty, only inside the curtains of another woman.

Contrary to what some churches teach every day and others teach on Sundays, love is not forgiving, and it can only lead people to seek it by whatever means and for whatever ends. 

The City Of Ladies

Here is another excerpt from the work of fiction I've been writing. In this piece, a trans woman who's about to have surgery has to return to her old neighborhood, which she hasn't seen in many years, for a funeral.  Remember that this is a work of fiction, so I don't want you to try to infer too much from it.

(If you want to read some other excerpts, check out What We Become, Fatigue, At The Beginning and The End  and Stories of Men and Women.)

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I'm sure that if I stay on this block after her funeral, after her burial, and someone were to realize who I am, someone'll blame me for mother's death.  People'll say that my absence, through all these years, put too much strain on her heart, her spirit.  (The one is a physical organ, so their accusations would make no sense.  As for the other:  What is it, anyway?)  I'd be accused of selfishness.  I suppose that, in a way, that would be right, if not fair.

I haven't been here for a long time because I've been worried about my own safety, and how mother'd react to me.  Even though she could sense that I'd changed--sometimes she said as much when we talked over the phone--I'd had no idea of how she'd react to my hair, the nails, the new clothes, the changing shape of my body.  And, even though sh'd told me, "Everybody's gone" time and time again, I still wondered whether I'd get off this block alive if I came back.  Until recently, I wasn't entirely confident about my transformation.  When you're not among the community of which you've become a part, whether by birth or choice, whatever image you try to project has to be created and transmitted even more seamlessly than when you're among your own.  When you're not in one of those neighborhoods where people in transition congregate, or are at least accepted or tolerated, it's all the more important to pass--in other words, to be unnoticed.  So, I wondered how I'd navigate the wake, the funeral, the burial. 

I must say that until today, it had been a while since anyone had given me a second glance or stared.  Now only the operation to give me the genitals I should've always had separates me from the next stage of my life, whatever that may hold. Older men--and sometimes younger ones--hold doors open for me and let me pass in front of them.  But once they let you through "their" space, they insist on standing or walking closer to me than they did before I started my transition.  So you've no choice but to walk into them, or to walk away from them.  Either way, you run that they will accuse you of "sending mixed signals" or of inciting their aggression.

In one sense, I'm lucky:  At the end of the day--which, sometimes, is really the end of the morning--I don't have to navigate them.  When I go home--or, more precisely, when I get to wherever I'm going to lay my head for the next few hours--I am alone; I don't have to navigate their hostility.

Most women aren't so fortunate.  Just last week, the woman who's shaped my hair as I've grown it slid the hem of her skirt up her thigh, revealing a scar and two bruises the father of her three-year-old daughter left.  She knew what I was about to tell her.  "As long as I don't set him off, he'll get better,"  she sighed.  

After I was gone a while from this block, mother'd begun to tell me about the brutality of the men there. Although I was well aware of it, I listened as if she were giving me the latest news.  She never mentioned names, but I knew that one of them had to be my father.  All the more reason to find him, to find out about him.  He left her bitter and angry: spent, even though she had to--or, at least, felt that she had to--continue living and working for my sake.  A man hit her, pushed her head against a wall.  And she never could recall what she did next, but the next thing she remembered was seeing him, doubled over with his hands gripping his crotch.  She doesn't know how she could have kicked or punched him after he knocked the wind, and very nearly the light, out of her.  At that moment, she was thinking of me, she said:  She wasn't going to let him to do me what he did to a baby girl--hers?--who supposedly was a "crib death", whatever that is.

I remembered those conversations, and our days in the kitchen with other women, no men anywhere in sight.  And the things mother used to say as if she were instructing me rather than answering a question or making a point.  Mother never wore--in fact, as far as I know, never even owned--any polo or T-shirts, sneakers or any other shoes or articles of clothing she was brought up to believe were men's.  Pants were the exception:  She almost always wore them, long, and only with completely enclosed shoes.  No sleeveless tops, always a jacket, even on warm days.  Only her house slippers had open toes and backs, and sometimes she'd wear something that looked like a cross between a housedress and a smock if she didn't have somewhere to go.  

But one day she put on a black silk dress that skimmed her breasts and curves down to her knees.  I didn't know she owned it, or the black pumps on she slid into.  Though the dress and shoes were out of style--actually, nobody on the block is ever in style; some of the women are simply en vogue--she seemed elegant, even pretty, if a bit severe.  I didn't have to ask.  "A lady wears a dress to a funeral," she intoned.

That was all I needed to know for today.  The fact that I don't have a dark men's suit or even a sportcoat is beside the point.  For that matter, I no longer own any ties, or anything that resembles men's dress shoes.

A lady:  the only kind of person who could attend her funeral.  Mrs. Marland, the woman who seemed not to talk to anybody besides my mother, and the woman whose name I never knew--when my mother talked about them, the were "ladies".  So were other females of a certain age.  As in, "the lady up the street" or "the lady with the black dog".  They were the only ones she talked to, who talked to each other, about each other.  The ladies:  The Crossing Guard Lady, The Redheaded Lady .  "Go to the lady at the newsstand and get  change for this $5 bill."  All my life, as a kid, I was always directed from one lady to another by my mother or some other lady.

So who else could come to see her at the end of her life but other ladies?

Fate And Hunger

Here is another part of the work of fiction I am writing.  (Some other parts have been posted; they are in italics.)


Foregone conclusions.  Perhaps the only one, or at least the first one, is the knowledge that they exist.  And that each of us has a different time, place or way of learning about them.  Some people do not come to that knowledge until the moment of their deaths.

Me, I learned about inevitability--about marching with fate-- one cool, damp, overcast Sunday afternoon.  In those days, I always knew what day of the week it was because I was expected to.  That's how it seemed, anyway:  Someone would decide that I had to be in a certain place at a certain moment.  Or I knew that it was Sunday because I saw people going to, and coming from, church and the store down the block was closed.

People walk differently when they're drawn by the impossibility of taking a different step from the ones they've been taking.  They don't walk like people who are doing "what they have to do," such as when they're going to work or the dentist.  On Sunday afternoon, at least on this block, there is only one repetition of fate:  people going to have lunch, dinner or fights with those people they're bound to see:  family members and in-laws, or their equivalents or proxies.

Really, they're not any different from the people who spend an overcast afternoon indoors because it rained in the morning.  They're drawn by the momentum, the inertia of density, like amusement park rides that continue to run even when nobody's riding them. It was on such a Sunday afternoon that I learned some things couldn't be stopped or steered any more than the forces of life--or death--on this block.

I think there's always a moment--I'd've called it a decisive moment but for the fact that I don't believe in a humanoid god--when a person begins the desperate run from this block or takes the first steps in the march to death.

I was chopping onions (and, oddly, tears weren't running from my eyes--it must have been a very sweet onion) for the huge bowl of salad that would accompany the two big pans of lasagna mother was making even though none of her friends or neighbors was coming over that day.  They decided they didn't want to go out in the rain, even after it stopped.

But we made that big Sunday dinner anyway, even though neither of us got hungrier on Sunday than on any other day of the week--or at least not hungrier enough that either of us noticed. There'd be leftovers for the rest of the week, at least.  Not that I minded:  I'd rather eat my favorite foods (and I've never eaten anything is more satisfying than that lasagna) days after they were made than something I like less even when it's fresh off the stove.

But leftovers weren't the reason why my mother went ahead and made that big dinner anyway: She'd've made a huge Sunday meal no matter what.  She always had and, I realized that day, always would.

She always did.  After I left this block, she'd always tell me what she was cooking whenever we talked.  For a long time, I wondered whether she was trying to entice me into coming back event though she knew I wasn't coming.

She was going to make those meals, not matter what.  Before I started helping her in the kitchen, and long after she knew I'd never be there again, she cooked.  We'--or she--'d eat them, or whatever portion we could, whether or not we were hungry.  That's what we and everybody else on this block did in the presence of a big Sunday meal.

Hunger is the reason to eat; the hunger of several people is the reason to cook a big meal. I realized that was how I'd live--it'd be my philosophy of life, if you will.  Talk when there's someone to talk to, broadcast when you're trying to reach a lot of people.  It's not a matter of what you're trying to say, or whether you have something say; it's all about saying to speaking to fill the void between you and whoever is there.  Likewise, if you're really hungry, you'll eat just about anything to fill the pit in your stomach.  Of course spinach and mineral water are better for you than hot dogs and soda, but you don't think about that when you're truly hungry:  that is to say, when you're not thinking about the vitamins or other substances your body breaks down when...I was going to say, when you no longer experience hunger.  But for all I know, there might be more of the same after death.

Mother cooked, no matter who was or wasn't there.  Adam talked--to me, to anybody who'd sit still for a while--even though he didn't have anybody to talk to.  They died on this block.  So did Grap, the football player who attacked me  at the end of my last day in school.  He got into a fight with some guy who hadn't "stolen" his "girlfriend", didn't "look gay" and hadn't looked at Grap the wrong way; he fought because, well, he hadn't looked at Grap in the  wrong way and couldn't be accused of provoking him.

Of course, on that gray mirror of an afternoon when I learned about fate, I couldn't yet know what propelled Adam to his death or what he'd share with anyone who'd died and would die on this block.  I knew only that I wasn't going to die, at least not there or here.  I couldn't.  I didn't know why.  I just knew I wouldn't.  That knowledge terrified me as much as--possibly more than--knowing that I'd have to make a choice not to.


And--I didn't know how I knew this--I could never be a man, not even a very young one--on this block.  Not a woman, either.  So I wouldn't've been  able to stay in the kitchen, with mother, for much longer.

What We Become

Note:  You may have noticed that two previous posts (Fatigue At The Beginning And The End and Stories of Men And Women) were in italics.  That is not a silly post-modern affectation. Rather, as you may have figured, they're parts of a work of fiction I started writing before my transition and have returned to.   This post is also, for the moment, part of that work


On this block, even in this day and age, most women become mothers, sometimes by choice but usually by circumstance. Some become wives--many more, I believe, than ever would have chosen such a fate.  I always wonder whether I'd end up like them had I been born female.  Would I've had a child--like the one I once was?  Would I've wished him--given him--that long garden of childhood people always seem to remember--which is to say wish--having?  For that matter, what would I make of having a boy--or girl? That is to ask:  What would I have done if I'd had a child who didn't fall between his or her own nature and what teachers, priests, government authorities and other adults expect?


Long before I knew I could undergo the transition I'll soon culminate, I swore I'd never have children.  It's one of two resolutions--getting away from this block was the other--that I've ever stuck to.  I knew, even then, I couldn't justify bringing  anyone into this world to face he same kinds of conflicts I had, or anything like them.  Not that I regret them now:  the struggle and frustrations have turned me into a person who's embarked on, I believe, the most exciting, excruciating and enerving experience one can have other than giving birth to another human being.  Since I'll never be able to do that (barring a sudden advance in medical technology) even after I've completed my transformation, I'll never know for sure.  But, as I said, I still have no wish to bring the needs of another mouth, the longings of another pair of eyes or the rupture of another skin into being.


I still can only wonder how many mothers--including my own--actually chose the role born from their children...and the role by which they're always identified.


If you're a woman and you don't give birth to, or raise, children, then the world--most men, anyway--will fix at least one of these labels on you:  bitch, whore, dyke.  In this scheme, a woman can be a bitch and a whore, but any actual or perceived lesbianism overrides everything else:  Men profess more hatred, which is to say more fascination, for the other two. 


I wonder where I'll fit in that scheme.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter, in a way, because I won't have any more to do with men than I have to.  Hopefully, I'll never have to turn tricks again, but I know better than to say "never again."  What I hope, at least now, that I'll never have to be of use to anybody ever again, for any reason or in any way--whether for their real needs or their fantasies.  Then, whatever I become will be all right