Quinquagesima

Today was warmer than normal for this time of year, as yesterday was. And both days passed under overcast skies that didn't so much threaten rain as it foreshadowed showers, which came softly and briefly late this afternoon.

In spite of the warmth, my skin tingled from the chill that tinged the dampness. It was enough to remind me that spring has not arrived yet; we will most likely have at least one more cold spell.

This sort of day, not belonging to either the winter nor the spring, is part of another season: Quinquagesima. It is more commonly known as Lent, but that term is too fraught with connotations of enforced religious ritual for my taste. However, "quinquagesima," as those of you who paid more attention than I did in Latin or catechism class know, is a period of fifty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. In most years, that period more or less coincides with that part of the year when you can practically smell and taste the coming of spring but you know that there's still cold wind and possibly more snow to come.

It sounds like it might have been some sort of pagan season. Most of the church's holidays and celebrations are adaptations of their pagan counterparts. As far as I know, the ceremonies and observances of most organized religions are appropriations of celebrations and rituals of the religions and cultures that preceded them in their locales. For that matter, every surviving culture is a hybrid. So is every surviving human being. After all, you don't get to my age, let alone old age, by being a purist, whatever that means.

But I digress. Well, maybe not: This season, or whatever you want to call the period of time I've described, is also a kind of cross-breed of time. And so my emotions about it are mixed.

If I wanted to be even more self-absorbed than I already am, I could say that this time of year is a reflection of the way I've been living now: What I've looked forward to, and longed for, is within sight. But it's not here yet. What I have now is the hope that I have indeed made it through the worst of the winter, literally and metaphorically, and that whatever inclement weather may come will be temporary and somehow prepare me for what I'm looking forward to. My years of being "trans" are almost, but not quite over; womanhood--at least more or less as most people envision and define it--is so close but not quite arrived.

In the hip-hop class, one of my students started a discussion of sense-memories. I don't think anyone in that class has read A la rechereche du temps perdu, but I mentioned how Proust could recall a whole world through the taste of a madeleine. They all understood. Now I am having an equally poignant memory, although this one is olfactory.

Now I am--in my mind--in the Rosary Garden next to the church in which I served as an altar boy. Around this time of year, people would leave memorial bouquets around the figurines representing the Stations of the Cross that lined a stone walway leading to a sort of mini-altar with a statue of the Virgin Mary. People, almost all of them women older than my grandmother, would come after the morning and early evening weekday masses to pray at this shrine. I wonder whether any of them noticed the smell of those flowers.

Yes, they all mingled into one smell, one more intensely sweet than any other I have experienced since. Lilacs (then, as now, my favorite flowers), hyacinths, crysanthemums and lilies intensified each others' effervescence and poignance. In fact, I can recall no other scent that so combines those those qualities.

Of course, all of those flowers were cut. More than likely, they came from greenhouses. Even then I knew that, but it didn't diminish the sense that at that time of year, life itself (not to mention beauty of any sort, let alone anything one has that is entirely his or hers) comes at a price, and that its emergence into this world is not the end of death. Those lives, those meanings, struggle to grow from the soil that became of their flesh, and the flowers of their beings are irrigated by their blood.

I think that I was beginning to understand something that I would read much, much later: James Baldwin's declaration to the effect that any person or any culture that has a language of her/his/its own has paid dearly for it.

And I knew--even if I couldn't articulate--that I wanted to live with and by that smell in the garden, to the tune of the music (I didn't know it was written by Bach.) played on its organ and the drama, rhetoric and poetry of sin, atonement and salvation. Not of faith--even then, as desperate as I was to believe, I could but a little, very little.

I wanted Easter because I wanted the spring. But first there was the quinquegesima, which included at least a few days--like today--that , only after a lot of experience, one begins to discern as previews or precursors rather than prologues or preludes.

In Four Months I'll Slip Into My New Gender Identity

So now we're down to four months...

Who's "we?," you ask. I guess I am speaking for both the person who is moving me onward in time and spirit, and the person who is there to welcome, admonish, forgive and adopt--or be adopted by--the one who will become her.

I'm thinking now of how the Rastafarians speak of the "I and I." Sometimes you hear it in Bob Marley's songs. He and they are referring to their corporeal, temporal selves, and to the spirit that is within them. It's one of those things that sounded really cool when I first heard about it, but that makes sense to me only now. Amazing, what changing into your true gender identity will do...

Excuse me while I change into my true gender identity. Hmm... Somehow I don't think that line will keep Dominick, or anyone else, eager with anticipation. On the other hand, I am actually saying that I'm slipping into "something more comfortable" when I say "my true gender identity." That is assuming, of course, that the person hearing either of those phrases is operating from the same set of experiences and assumptions as I am.

What did I just say? Omigoddess, I really am starting to sound like I'm in a graduate seminar! I want to slip into something more....

Naah. Don't think I'll do that. I don't think my fellow students or that prof would want to see me wearing a whole lot less than what I've been wearing to that class. I am definitely one of those 99.98% (Don't ask how I came up with that number.) of people who look better with clothes on. Of course, 100% of the people are programmed or hard-wired, or whatever you want to call it, to long for, lust over and sometimes pursue, that other 0.02%

Oh, dear. I don't want to spend the next 122 days making useless, pointless and baseless generalizations. They come to me like hiccups. But holding my breath or drinking a glass of water doesn't seem to help.

Four months...Seriously, now I'm really starting to feel the day drawing near. Almost a year ago, when I first set the date for my surgery, it seemed like an eternity away. Then, when I started counting down a year on this blog, it still seemed a rather long stretch of time. I mean, at my age, one year isn't an aeon. But it is something. Even six months--the point at which I expected to sense the imminence of the surgery--seemed like a fairly significant chunk of time. But now, four months seems like no time at all.

I know of the logistical things I have to do: get an EKG and an HIV test, buy a ticket out there, pay for the surgery and arrange for my time away and the time I come back. There are most likely other things I'm not thinking of or simply can't imagine. Will I have long conversations with friends, associates or family members? If so, will they be rancorous or reconcilitory (for me or the other person), tactful or tearful? Goodbyes or greetings? Or simply matter-of-fact, or "none of the above?"

What must I, and what will I want to, do between now and then? More important, is there something I'm supposed to do between now and then? I can't think of what it might be. Am I supposed to say "goodbye" to my life as a man? My life as a trans person? Or as Version I of Justine?

Well, I think I said "goodbye" to life as a man a while back. Actually, I said a number of "goodbyes," beginning with the one that went no further than my own mind. That was on the day I saw that woman in Saint Jean de Maurienne: the one I've mentioned in a few other posts. Then, a few days later, Tammy met me at JFK and I held her more desperately than I've ever held onto anything--save, perhaps, for the moment that preceded that one--or anyone in my life. When I held Tammy, I could feel that life slipping away from me as I grasped for it for it with more and more desperation and determination, if less tenacity.

I also realized at that moment that she was the only reason why I had any desire at all to continue living as a man. If I were to become Justine--myself--I would certainly lose her. She'd said as much earlier. She wanted that image and fantasy of Nick I presented; I wanted it only to the extent that it allowed me to stay with her. The four years I spent with her allowed me to retreat from the human race as much as was possible while living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Being with her also spared me from blind dates set up with friends', family members' or co-workers' co-workers, family members or friends.

I moved out a year after our rendez-vous at JFK. During that time, I could feel the life I'd been living, and the identity by which I'd been living, sliding through my grasp like an eel in a dream. Every movement took me a little further around the bend that turned the current of my life away from the familiar but fallow shores to ones I could only imagine.

In particular, I am remembering the hot day in May my niece Lauren made her First Holy Communion. It was a few weeks before I moved out, and I had not talked about my situation, in any sense, with my brothers or my parents. I sat to the right of all of them, and all through the Mass, I just barely kept myself from breaking down into tears and sobs. I knew that once I started crying, I wouldn't stop: I might even fall to the floor or further lose control in some other way. And all those families at that Mass didn't come to see a grown man (supposedly) crying even more uncontrollably their babies could. And that is exactly what did happen after I left everyone and had grabbed a seat--alone--in the train going home.

This is the last time she'll see her Uncle Nick. Or that they'll see their brother or son Nicky. As it turned out, I would see them all again that Thanksgiving, after I told everyone I'd broken up with Tammy and moved out, but didn't tell them why. I was still working and living as Nick, except for a few people I'd recently met at and through the LGBT Community Center in The Village. They were the very first people in the world who would come to know me as Justine.

That February, I went to my brother's house for a birthday party and to meet a newly- divorced woman who worked with him. He thought we might like each other, he said. She seemed nice enough, but I had absolutely no intention of dating her or anyone else at that time. I let her, in essence, interview me only so that I wouldn't have to describe what was leaving me.

The next time I saw any of my family members, I was "coming out" to them. First, to one brother. To another, a couple of weeks later. And to my parents, a couple of months after that. By that time, all of my friends and co-workers knew me as Justine.

Now I have people in my life who've known me only as Justine. I wonder whether they've seen any changes in me (besides my weight gain!) and whether they'll see any after the operation. Will I, in essence, be a different Justine, or a different version of Justine, from the one they know now? Is that person they know fading from view as that same person's life is moving away from him, from her, and toward the woman who is her vision of herself?

The answers to these questions, and others, may begin to reveal themselves four months from now. Maybe it's happening already. Either way, I've a lot to do during the next four months.

Every Girl Should Be So Lucky

I knew the economy was bad. But I wasn't expecting to see anything like this: A favorite Thai restaurant was empty at lunchtime on Friday.

On other occasions when Bruce and I went there, it was full and we had to wait for a table. But today we had the place to ourselves. The food was as good as it's always been. And, well, you couldn't get better service than we had.

The good news was that we had the place to ourselves. Bruce is just about the last person in the world to put on an act for anyone, much less complete strangers. But I guess I have been known to perform for an audience that didn't know they were my audience. I lapse into it unconsciously; sometimes I catch myself as I'm doing it.

Somehow, though, it seemed as if each of us had let our guard down. It's not the first time we've done that for each other. He talked about the emotional life of his family, and how he's been affected by it. His father in particular, he said, was emotionally distant. "He only called twice just to see how I was--and those were after he got sick," Bruce recalled. His father, he said, didn't connect well with people and wasn't demonstrative.

Bruce isn't, either. But the funny thing is that throughout my life--at least for the nearly three decades I've known him--he's been the most emotionally available man I've ever known. For a long time--in fact, until I saw my social worker for the first time--he was the only man with whom I'd ever talked about the molestation and other painful things I've experienced. And until I met Dominick, I never thought I'd talk about any of those things with any other man.

Yes, Bruce has always been a different sort of friend for me. We drank and looked at women together; once we were interested in the same woman. We acted like the Blues Brothers; another time we walked around Union Square and the East Village (when both were funkier places than they are now) in Hawaiian shirts and acted like tourists because--well, because we could.

I've seen him face his brother's and father's deaths, as well as other sadness in his family. He's seen me become sober--and Justine.

The funny thing is that all through this, our friendship has been the least gendered relationship I've had with anybody. Even when we were acting like a couple of crazy young men, I never felt like we were just a couple of guys. He said as much, back before either of us had ever used a PC. Even in those days, he called my sexuality "fluid" and that I "wasn't your typical straight guy."

And there we were today, talking about the ways we've been affected emotionally by people in our lives. Not the sort stuff that laces conversations about the Knicks or Giants.

He's as much of a straight guy as you'll ever find. But somehow I've felt free to be vulnerable--whcih is to say Justine, even before I "came out" as her-- when I've been around him. And I feel that all the more the longer I know him.

Now, you tell me who or what is a girl's best friend? Yes, I love Dominick, but that's different. He's in my life now; maybe he will be for a long time. But Bruce has been here. Every girl should be so lucky.

No Escape and No Luxury

Getting closer and closer...

Didn't accomplish much today. Got up late, but I probably needed the sleep, as I'd been up late the last couple of nights.

I suppose I shouldn't beat myself up over my non-productiveness. At least a couple dozen people I know would tell me that. But that won't stop me. If you've been reading my entries, you know me well enough to know that.

The doctor told me there'd be days like this. So did my therapist and my social worker. Much as I esteem them, their seal of approval doesn't quite work for me in this case. Then again, I know a few things now that I didn't before I met them.

It's funny how men--some men, anyway--think women are being frivolous when we sleep late, go out shopping (whether or not we buy anything), read romance novels or watch soap operas. I must admit I still haven't developed a taste for the last two. I had the TV on today as I was reading e-mail and doing some paperwork. I think the midday news was on when I started; by the time I looked at the TV screen again, a soap opera--or what is now known as "daytime TV"--was playing. I caught the program just in time to see a doctor preparing to remove the bandages wrapped around some female patient's eyes. Of course, whatever caused her to get eyefuls of glass shards had to do with money or sex, both of which are--as near as I can tell--the same thing on those programs. And, I must admit, I stopped what I was doing to see if that woman could see when the doctor removed the bandages. Alas, she couldn't. Bad for her, good for the plot, I guess.

I used to think that housewives liked those programs because they were bored. Of course, it's not hard to understand how they would be: If she has more intelligence than he does yet she is relegated to changing diapers and cleaning furniture, what else could she be? If she's lucky, that's all she'll be.

But, years later, I found out that a lot of gay men watch those programs, too. And I'm not talking only about the "kept" ones: I've talked to an advertising art executive, a man who travelled the world in the employ of one of those firms that's gone bust in the last few months and an engineer who taped those programs and watched them at the end of the day. Why did they like such programs? For that matter, why do they like Susan Lucci, or Joan Crawford?

Not so long ago, I would have felt superior to all those soap opera fans because I could finish the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. Lots of people think that's a waste of time, too, but I always rationalized that at least those puzzles were developing skills. Yeah, just like Renaissance scholars read Latin, Greek and Hebrew literature so they could better understand the Bible.

And you know what? I still am superior because I can finish the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. Yes, I am. How, I don't know. But you know, once you become a snob, you've got to keep it up. Just like I had to keep up my misanthropy and my disdain of scholars and academicians. And you're soooo convinced of that, right?

OK, so I'm not so superior to all those people who "waste" their time watching soap operas. Or the ones who go to escapist movies and amusement parks. Or the ones who go fishing or to football games. Or who golf. (I don't think I'll ever understand the attraction of that.)

And there are plenty of people who think that poetry is a waste of time. Or playing with one's cats. Or having cats at all. Even if one of those cats is named Jeffrey. The man who had such a cat was Smart. Really! With a name like Christopher Smart, how could he not be smart? Or, how could someone with a name like Angelina Jolie not be beautiful?

I'm starting to realize that everyone needs to do at least one thing that's gratuitous, or even excessive. It's not a luxury; it's what someone whose life is confined by the written or unwritten prejudices against who and what they are through no choice of their own. You can be the most wonderful mother or anything else but, at the end of the day, you're just a woman in the eyes of those who set the rules. And that art executive, and the others I mentioned are, in this world, just gay men, whether or not they're in the closet. The only difference is that, if they're closeted, other people gain power by their complicity in keeping the secret; if said gays are "out," they are labels and targets. No matter what he does, Barney Frank will probably always be known as "the gay senator." And those who don't like him will use that fact before any other, or even the fantasies they've built around that fact, to rationalize their disdain or hatred.

I think that the professor of the class I'm taking was making that point when she unabashedly confessed that she loves Uncle Tom's Cabin. I agree with most of what James Baldwin said about it in "Everybody's Protest Novel": It does considerable violence to the English language with its melodrama and sentimentality. I'll grant that it certainly influenced people. But I'm not yet ready to be convinced that it belongs in the canon as much as Moby Dick does.

By the way: One way you can tell whether someone has actually read Moby Dick is to talk about the story line of The Old Man and The Sea. After all, they're both about a guy trying to catch a fish. All right, a sea creature: I know, a whale isn't a fish. At any rate, if you recount the plot of Hemingway's novel, the person who's lying about having read Moby Dick will go along with whatever you say. Trust me, I've done it.

All right, now I can say it: I have read both Moby Dick and Old Man and the Sea. And I have no particular desire to read either again, although if I continue my studies, I'll probably be reading MD again. Ditto for Uncle Tom's Cabin. What will I think of it.

Back to women, gays and soap operas: Just as playing is part of a child's development--and sometimes part of an adult's creative process--I'm starting to think that lush, florid things serve some sort of purpose for those whose lives are truncated by bigotry. If poetry is not a luxury (which I know it isn't), maybe "camp" is not excess after all.

OMG...What did I just say? Every time I turn around, I'm becoming something else I never imagined I would, or swore I would never allow myself to, become.

Could it be that when you're poor or oppressed, there's no such thing as a luxury, or of frivolty? And does this mean that when there's no escape from your condition, nothing is "just" an "escape?"

Or could it be that it's simply getting late and I'm getting tired again?

My Course, A Real Education As Justine

One of my students in the Poetics and Rhetoric of Hip-Hop class I'm teaching is writing a feature for the college newspaper. It happens that a history professor, George White, is teaching a course on the history of hip-hop. They are the first two courses in hip-hop to be offered at the college. That is the subject of the article my student wants to write.

She asked, among other things, how this course differs from the others I've taught. Well, it's an elective, so nobody's forced to be in it. And I have more freedom in my choices of materials, assignments and such than I have, say, in a composition course.

But the real difference, I said, is that in that class, I'm teaching from my heart. When I teach about poetry, I am sharing the essence of what I am. And in linking it with hip-hop, I hope that I am offering my students an opportunity I had: My interest in poetry developed from the music--or, more precisely, the lyrics--I grew up with. Among them are songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, John Lennon, Joni Mitchell and, later on, Bob Marley.

There was something else I couldn't explain at that moment. It really is the first time I am teaching a course as Justine. That, I think, is the reason I freaked out just before the semester started: I never expected to have a class that I designed and that I would teach in my way. I submitted the proposal for it, thinking it would be rejected or that someone else would teach the course. Plus, it seemed almost ludicrous that I, a white middle-aged transgender woman, would be teaching about hip-hop in a college in which 80 percent of the students are black.

But my race, gender identity or the fact that I didn't grow up with hip-hop hasn't been a factor. In fact, I've joked about all of those things. And the students tell me that they enjoy the class all the more for it. And, somehow, I think that if I were still living as Nick, the heterosexual guy, I never would have taught that class. Truth is, acually, that I couldn't have.

I'm not quite sure of why I think that, but I feel certain about it. Nick had the intelligence I have (for better or worse) and the education I inherited. But I also inherited his fear of becoming a scholar or critic, or some other such thing. They were failures as artists and at life, or so I believed, and that is what I didn't want to be.

But one prof, who's a playwright, advised me not to worry. You'll always have your own writing, he said, and what I'm doing with that class should help me, because it's creative, too. After all, he explained, it takes a creative spirit to bring together the sorts of works I'm joining.

So where did all that fear come from? Well, I guess I was still fighting a part of myslef. I stopped the war that I'd been carrying on with myself when I started my transition to Justine-hood. But I still do battle with smaller issues. I guess if you're used to fighting, you look for conflicts, however small. I really don't need to do that anymore, but that doesn't stop me.

Maybe that's the reason why I couldn't have created or taught such a course while I was still living as Nick. Making the change has, bit by bit, freed my mind--and most important, my spirit. And now I know that the course--or, for that matter, a real education, to the degree that I'm capable of getting or giving it--is not only an intellectual expereince: It is spiritual, if not in the religious sense.

Well, all I can do now is thank Nick for providing me with some of the tools and skills I need to do that sort of work.

Snowstorm

School's out....for today.

It snowed last night, let up this morning and snowed some more this afternoon. In all, eight or ten inches, depending on which report you believe, covered the streets, cars, houses and the park. It's the biggest snowfall we've had in couple of years, at least.

But the worst part of today's weather was the wind. Of course, it makes cold weather feel frigid. What made things worse today was that it whipped the snow around, turning puffy flakes into needles against the skin. Garbage cans and all sorts of other objects tumbled down the streets and sidewalks. I think that's the real reason why schools closed: Navigating was hazardous, if not dangerous.

So today was a day to curl up with a good book....and catch up on my reading. One thing I'd forgotten about being a student: You're never caught up. Same thing with teaching: There's always a pile of papers and students who wanted them returned yesterday. With an "A," of course.

You're never caught up...on work. On the bills. In love. In...well, you name it. How is that?

If I were to catch up, what would happen to me? I forget who said that when you don't have any more bills to pay, you die. Or is it the other way around? Would I have to find another job if I didn't have a stack of students' papers and exams in front of me?

No work left to do. Nothing to look forward to. What would that be like? I hope that's not what the days after surgery will be like. I mean, after all, I've never looked forward to anything as much for as long as I've anticipated the surgery. I know that there will be other things to do, most of them things I'm already doing.

Well, I know one thing: I won't be shovelling snow. I won't be able to do that. Besides, I don't think there'll be any snow to shovel at that time of year. But, as they say, you never know.

For now, I have a day off, work, hope and anticipation. I guess it's not a bad combination.

A Matter of Time

"Can you believe it? We're into March already."

"I know."

"Only four more months..."

That was Mom reminding me of how close--or how far?--I am from my surgery.

It seems that everything has become a matter of time now. The past few months, the past year, have flown by. Yet I feel like a six-year-old kid to whom Christmas seems like an eternity away. And I know it'll be here before I know it. Of course, if you tell that child Christmas is just around the corner, he or she will never believe you.

Mom and I were both thinking about the same people today: her parents, Uncle Sonny (her brother) and my cousin Sandra. All gone, long gone, although their deaths seem to have come only yesterday. Uncle Sonny's birthday would have been on the 7th, and grandpa's birthday--and the date of his death--were the 21st: the first day of spring. For a long time, I hated that date and that month; the coming of spring used to seem like the original lie. Flowers opened from earth, from mud that had been someone's bones; the dew's source was in their blood. My early poem The Lies of Spring was my first attempt to honestly describe how I felt about it all.

This Saturday, on the 7th, Uncle Sonny would have been 77 years old. He was the same age as I am now when he died. Grandpa was 72; Mom and I both expressed disbelief that on the 21st, it will have been 43 years since his death. Years ago, she told me that she's "never really gotten over it." She chastised herself; I said that there's no timetable for grief.

Then again, she doesn't want to handle things the way I do. She never said that to me, but I wouldn't wish on anybody the depression I fell into after my grandmother, her mother, died. I was depressed before her death and was all but inconsolable for several years afterward. It's really a wonder that I made it through that time; how is another story.

At least today I didn't have to be surrounded by my past. I'd gone to the Hunter College library to pick up a book I need for the class I'm taking. I very rarely go into the part of town that surrounds the college and have had little contact with the college. So images of my old stories didn't parade themselves before me and through my mind, as they did during the walk I took after having lunch with Bruce the other day.

Those last couple of days have flown by. And, yes, the day of my surgery will come before I know it. When I look back from that date, this day, the last couple of days and the past few months will seem to have raced by. And I will probably feel eager and anxious to start my new life, even if it has already begun.

Size Matters

OK, now I'm going to tell you something counterintuitive. (Oh, that word is so pretentious. But I used it again!) It might not matter much in the scale of things, but here it is: Size didn't matter as much to me when I was living as Nick as it does now.

Now, you're probably wondering why I'm worrying about the size of that. Well, guess what: You have a dirty mind. I was being entirely literal. And, because I'm a lady, I would never, ever talk about that!

So the hormones haven't tempered my mischieviousness. Oh, well. The doctor didn't say that they would, and I never said that I wanted them to. What the doctor doesn't tell you won't hurt you: Is that how it goes? Or is it that what you don't want can't hurt you? Either way, I'm safe, I guess.

About the issue of size: I noticed it again when I went to get my nails done. On occasion, you'll see a man getting a manicure, but 99% of the time--even here in New York--all of the patrons as well as the nail finishers are female. I am taller and bigger than most women though, I'm told, I'm not at the far edge of the bell curve. On the other hand, as a male, I was average--almost militantly so--in both height and body size. As a matter of fact, when I was in shape, I was thinner than most guys and smaller overall, save for the shoulders I developed from weight-lifting.

Today I realized why I notice my size even more in nail salons than in other all- (or mostly-) female environments. Just about everyone who finishes nails, at least in this city, is Chinese or Korean. The half-dozen women who do that work in the salon I usually patronize (Hannah and Her Sisters in Astoria) are Korean. And so were all of the nail technicians in the places I patronized before I started to frequent Hannah and Her Sisters. Next to those women, I seem like King Kong.

I haven't had my nails done outside New York yet, so I don't know if the situation holds true everywhere. From what I could see, it seemed to be the case in the part of Florida where my parents live, but not in Paris or Istanbul. Before going to those places, I had my nails done, so I didn't have to avail myself to the local equivalents. Now I wish I had, just to see what they were like.

Some sociologist or labor historian should undertake a study that would explain why seemingly every nail technician in New York, or any urban or suburban area in the US, is from China or Korea. We know why, for example, Jews came to dominate the garment industry and how they and Italians pretty much were the film industry. Or why for more than a century, the vast majority of cops were Irish or machinists were German. But why are nail technicians Chinese or Korean?

Maybe the answer won't matter that much. But less consequential matters have consumed great amounts of intellectual and other kinds of capital.

For now, I guess I'll have to get used to standing out in a nail salon the way an NBA center next to one of the jockeys at Aqueduct Race Track--at least until Amazons take over the nail salons of this city.

Will size matter then?

Le Cafe Perdu

Today Bruce and I went to lunch at the Red Egg, a Chinese restaurant on a part of Centre Street that sits in a nether-world between Chinatown, Soho and the Lower East Side. It's hard to get any sit-down meal in Manhattan, much less one as good as we had, for seven dollars (before tax and tip).

Today I had Red Egg Curry Chicken. It was so good that I was scooping up and downing what remained of the sauce after I'd finished the chicken, asparagus and okra that made up the rest of the dish. And Bruce's General Tso's Chicken, which I sampled, was as good.

We've eaten there a couple of times before, and I'm sure we'll go back. The decor is a cross between a Soho bistro and a Chinese restaurant in Queens. That is to say, it's made up of sleek red and black lacquer and blondish wood.

A good sign is that the place was full, or close to it, each time we've gone. And, at least half of the customers were Chinese. Also, they set your table with chopsticks. I'm not sure that they have western-style utensils: I didn't see anyone using them.

After we finished, Bruce had to return to work. So, after we parted, I wandered across town on Spring Street to the Bowery, then up toward Cooper Square. The day was mild but overcast; everyone rightly believed that we would get the rain that was forecast for the early evening.

On a day like this, which feels like an early spring day except for a touch of damp chill, flesh and bright colors peeked out the way the sun does as it moves through layers of clouds. Near Bruce's office, in a building sandwiched between two boutiques, young women fluttered about in shorts with brightly-patterned tights or skirts over sheer hosiery. Some of the young men weren't wearing coats or jackets, or even sweaters, over their T-shirts. Back when I was young and full of testosterone (and alcohol), I would have done the same.

The styles may change, but they are re-enacting what seems to be a ritual I've seen for as long as I can remember. If we'd had a day like this a few weeks ago, it wouldn't have been seen as a prelude to spring: It would have been just an unusually warm day in winter. And so everyone would have been wearing coats and scarves and such.

Well, some people--young women, mostly--wore scarves, mainly as accessories. One in particular just oozed style with hers, in shades of champagne, lilac and dark pink. Its ends fluttered behind her as she pumped her Peugeot city bike--the kind they sell in France, not an export model--with fenders, a rack, generator light and all. She would have looked completely appropriate on the streets around Saint Germain des Pres or Montmartre.

She is me, in another life. If only...

Seeing her, and those downtown streets and buildings that criscross each other at mad angles, I started to get, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, woozy with deja vu. I recalled walking those same streets when they both more carefree and more dangerous than they are now. I knew of some of the dangers; others escaped--along with a lot of other things--my consciousness as I drank or intoxicated myself in some other way. I saw a place--Phebe's, still there--where I used to drink enough so that I didn't notice or care that the hamburger I ordered was burnt. It brought back images of other places, long gone, where the graffiti in the bathroom provided more debate on issues of the day, and larger questions, than just about any still-surviving magazine or other publication that has any sort of intellectual premise or pretense.

One place like that was Le Figaro cafe, which used to take up a corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets in the heart of the Village. Back before Starbuck's cafes started popping up like weeds after a rainstorm, Le Figaro was one of the few places where you could get something like a real espresso or cappucino rather than the burnt-coffee-bean-and-boiled-milk concoctions other places served. Back in those days, they served decent quiche Lorraine and some not-bad desserts. But those weren't the reasons to go there. Nor was the decor: If you can imagine an interrogation room from a '40's or '50's noir film wallpapered with copies of the eponymous French newspaper (ironically enough, one edited from a conservative, almost reactionary, point of view), you have a good idea of what the interior looked like.

From what I understand, Bob Dylan and his peers used to go there after playing at The Back Fence and other nearby dives. Of course, that gives it the same sort of cachet Dylan Thomas's patronage gives the White Horse Tavern. But the real reason you went to Le Figaro, or any of those old-time Village coffee places, was to watch people. So, it was always best (to me, anyway) to go on a day like this one, which would probably be the first of the season on which the sidewalk tables would be set up.

Today, a lot of those people I looked at back in the day are probably gone. As are one bartender and one waitress who used to work there. I had crushes on both of them that I probably wouldn't have had if I'd seen them in a New Jersey mall. A lot of other people probably did, too. That's how it was in those old Village (East or West) cafes and coffeehouses: They really didn't have a whole lot to recommend them except their locations, but somehow they transformed the people you met in them in much the same way that young people who just got off the bus from Iowa or Kansas or Oregon became bohemians when they opened up their suitcases or backpacks in that neighborhood.

Of course I would have liked to have been in one of those cafes as that young woman who rode her Peugeot today. However, neither she nor anyone else I saw today would, even if they could, choose to be a patron in one of those cafes I remember. Nor could I. As much as I feel I would have liked to experience those days and all of my past as Justine rather than as Nick, I know that if I had (if I could have), I may not be here today, little more than four months from my surgery.

I forget which feminist writer said that in the Sexual Revolution, women got screwed. And so it was back in those giddily serious days. Now I realize that the women, almost invariably young and fashionable in an arty kind of way, served as props for those guitar- and chess-playing young men of yore. Even fairly recently, cafes like le Figaro were mainly the provinces of straight people. They gays were on the western and eastern extremes of the neighborhood, and they had their own versions of the cafes, not to mention the bars.

Those cafes are gone, too, as are so many of the men who patronized them. Only the women--reincarnations of them, anyway--remain. Today Bruce had lunch with one who hadn't been thought of because she couldn't conceive herself in those days.

Going to School: It's a Girl Thing, Ya Know

It's really strange to have the day off on a Thursday. For as long as I can remember--yes, even back in elementary school--it was my longest and busiest day of the week.

Of course, when you teach English, you never really have a day off. There are always papers to grade, lesson plans to create and reading to do. And now, of course, I'm taking a class.

Yesterday, Cady Ann, the English Department secretary, wondered why I didn't take a class sooner and why I don't pursue a PhD. Well, it's not out of the question. I just hope that if I do it, I'll still be employable.

Somehow I had the sense that my gender transition would involve getting some sort of an education. I didn't really want to believe it, as I had lots of really bad experiences as a student, and more than a few as an educator. But deep down, I knew that I would. I didn't know whether it would mean the course I seem to be pursuing or something else entirely. A couple of years ago, with the encouragement of one prof who used to work in social services, I seriously entertained the idea of getting a master's in social work. Ironically enough, thinking about my social worker helped to spark--and extinguish the flame of--that idea. I guess it's not hard to see why people whose lives have been changed by counselors, therapists, social workers or teachers think they would like to spend their lives helping other people in the same way. On the other hand, I wonder how many of them understand what it's like to deal with people who have the same problems as theirs, only worse, every day.

And I honestly feel that I am not as patient or sensitive as my social worker or Regina, who worked at the college where I work. Then again, I probably have more of a chance of marrying into the Royal Family (as if I ever wanted to do such a thing) than I would of becoming as good a writer as Shakespeare. Yet I keep on writing.

In any event, I don't think now that I'll do social work or counseling. For that matter, I won't go to law school, either, in spite of encouragement I received from three lawyers and a few people who are doing advocacy work of one kind or another. The study might be interesting, but I'm not so sure about the practice. Not only that, I'd have to incur lots of debt, which means I'd have to take a corporate position or something equally unappealing.

So let's see...I could always train myself for some trade or another. Or another profession, like accounting. Uh-huh.

What else can I think of to avoid the inevitable. The inevitable? No, can't be. There must be some way of not becoming another tranny who does gender studies or some such thing. I mean, real education is old white men teaching about dead white men, right? At least that's how it was in my day.

But these days some people have different ideas. Everyone, including the professor, in the class I'm taking seems to have them. Even the crotchy conserviative that I am is going along with them.

So I'm back in school again, just like I'm supposed to be. Except that in some way I can't say I'm "back." I'm starting over, really, just as I have in everything else for the past seven years. The day Tammy and I split up, I knew that starting over was all I could do.

And ya know, going to school is a woman's thing. I mean, real men don't have to go to school. Guys are supposed to be physically powerful and their work is supposed to show it. Back when I was riding my bike a couple of hundred miles a week and lifting weights, I could live on fried foods and cheese and have a lower cholesterol level than 99% of people in the industrialized world. Schooling could never do that for me.

As long as I didn't know, I didn't need to know. And if I found out, I could ignore it and it would go away. Or, better yet, I could exorcise it by exercising myself, whether on the saddle or in bed.

Oh, you never heard of that theory before? It goes like this: If somehow you realize you're anything but hetero and/or can't live by that "M" on your birth certificate, you get married. If that doesn't work, you try it again--or at least live with a new girlfriend. Before, between and after each marriage or relationship, you sleep with a woman any chance you get.

In other words, act like a het guy and you'll be one. I don't think Skinner or any of the other behaviorists mentioned that, but they also never said that their principles couldn't be applied to one's gender identity or sexuality. You know, that's further proof of the axiom that if you don't know, you don't need to know. And its corollary: Your troubles begin the moment you know.

In some weird way, that's what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick said in The Epistemology of the Closet. Knowledge is not necessarily power. She gave the example of Ronald Reagan meeting Francois Mitterand. While Monsieur Mitterand spoke some of the most graceful English ever to come from lips first attuned to speaking another language, Ronnie Raygun couldn't utter so much as Bonjour. So, of course, their conversation was in English.

Naturally, the first thing I thought of was Caliban saying to Prospero, You have taught me language/And the profit on't is, I can curse. Oui, j'en ai entendu l'anglais, et donc, j'en ai parlait avec l'idiote american. And I got an education so that I could do the work of people who don't want to think--and get paid less than they're paid.

And, of course, this meant that Mitterand was forced to be all the more proficient in English. At the same time, it destroyed any incentive Reagan ever had, if indeed he had any, to learn French or any other language besides English.

That's how it is when you're a woman or a member of any other stigmatized group. You have to learn and know more--or, at least, different things--from members of the dominant groups. This allows them to be ignorant, which makes it all the more necessary to learn even more.

So, yeah, going to school is for women. And gays. And blacks. And...well, you get the picture.

Thus am I back in school. At least I'm enjoying it, so far, which really will trump any other sort of motivation. I need to know, I want to know, I can't imagine not knowing. And those are the reasons why I must keep on learning. What else can a middle-aged woman who happens to be trans do? Learn...and enjoy it.

Here I've come again.

You Should See Yourself Giddy With Shakespeare and Ice-T

I haven't studied biology in more than thirty years. I'll be the first to admit that I don't remember much, and what little I do recall is probably hopelessly out of date. So, take this next statement for whatever it's worth, coming from me: The human body does not convert estrogen into ecstasty, with a lower- or an upper-case "e."

Or does it?

I think I'm experiencing a 48-hour case of what I now call the "girlie giddies." As I was about to start taking hormones, the doctor said I would become more emotional and have mood swings. As if I didn't already! I don't recall the doctor being more specific. What I do know is that I've had some crying jags as well as the girlie giddies.

What has it been about these last two days? I'm not doing anything special, and everything's working out and people want more of it. I was sorry to see the end of yesterday's session of the class I'm taking. I felt like I was watching the credits at the end of a film and I didn't want to get out of my seat. And I felt that way today, too, at the end of the hip-hop class I'm teaching. The time just flew; even the students said they couldn't believe it was over. "We have next week, and ten more," I reminded them.

"Can't wait," one chimed.

"I've never seen a prof on such a roll," another declared.

Actually, they were on a roll. It seemed as if the connection between Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 and Ice-T's Power was the most obvious thing in the world, although, to my knowledge, no one made it before me.

Here's The Bard's sonnet:


When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.


Well, one thing this sonnet proves (at least to me) is that anything Robert Browning did, Shakespeare was doing, more sagely and more elegantly--0r at least in a more intimate way-- two centuries before him. I mean, if you wanted a four-word summary of this poem (if that could do it justice), "Love Among The Ruins" would be a good one. For the first twelve lines, the speaker of the poems is talking about his losses. But, in the tradition of the Shakespearean sonnet, there is a "turn" before the penultimate line. And what do those last two lines say? Well, when I remember you, at least I have something to hold on to. Or something like that.

And the language. Oh, the language! "Then I can grieve at grievances foregone/And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er/The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan/Which I new paid as if not paid before." Just listen to those sounds: the "g" consonances in the first of those lines, the assonance (Yes, he had a real nice assonance!) of "o" sounds in the following lines and the coup de grace of "the fore-bemoaned moan" and "paid as if not paid before." Those "fore"s call out to each other; so do the "moans" which also resonate with the (rhyme of) "foregone" and "woe to woe tell o'er."

Then, just as we think all is lost, we hear that final couplet. In nearly other poet's hands, the "friend/end" would have seemed mundane, or even banal. But here, as the conventional or "weak" rhyme, it actually brings closure and a sort of affirmation. And, as one of my students noted, the "s" sounds in the final line are reassuring, too. Why is that, I wondered. The best answer I have for that is that they are refractions, not reflections, of those "s" sounds in the poems first line. "Sessions of sweet silent thought" is a quieting rather than a quiet sound; it's almost repressive. On the other hand, "All losses are restored and sorrows end" has a more reassuring, if not empowering, sound to it, which comes for the price of all those sad and melancholy sounds in the middle of the poem.

And what of Ice-T's song? Here's a link to the lyrics:

http://www.metrolyrics.com/power-lyrics-ice-t.html

That song is practically an inversion of Shakespeare's sonnet: Through most of it, Ice-T raps about having the trappings of power. But after the "turn"--at "Power starts with 'p'..."--the singer realizes he doesn't have real power after all, at least not in this society.

It was such a joy to see students discovering for themselves what I've just described. It made me even more giddy. One of the students, who took the Intro to Literature class with me four years ago, exclaimed, "You're just lit up! You should see yourself." To which I replied, "No, you should see yourself."

Yes, you really should see yourself.

My Worst Fears Are Coming True And I'm Ecstatic. What Do I Do Now?

Maybe I'm not joking after all when I tell people about my "special tranny powers."

You know...I can put together an outfit. I can be witty and sarcastic. I can learn anything because I can read your mind and I can explain it all because I've got a good mouth on my shoulders. (Thank Chanel La Vie en Rose lipstick for the latter.)

Seriously...Today I said things and I'm still wondering where they came from. What's amazing is that I didn't get myself in trouble.

Here I was, thinking I was an utter fool because I had to read and re-read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay about paranoia and her introduction to "The Epistemology of the Closet." And I had to read them again before they made any sense to me. And there were times I wanted to let my cats have at those pages. Damn, Sedgwick, what's with all the Latin words? Or sentences longer than the Verrazano Bridge?

Yet, I wanted to keep on reading her. Of course, the material's of interest to me. But that wasn't the only thing that kept me going. I guess you might say that I wanted to master difficult material to prove something to myself. But that's not the whole story, either. It was almost as if I couldn't help but to read those essays.

Oh my goddess! I'm reading a gender theorist--and enjoying it?! This is exactly what I always feared. What do I do now?

Well...I've had my worst fears come true before. Like the day I realized I was going to live my life without alcohol or drugs. Time was when I could more easily imagine myself buried alive. But of course it was what I needed to do so I could live long enough to face my biggest fear of all...

...Which, of course, is that I am Justine. That I would actually give up that cocoon of white male heterosexual privilege in which I lived. Where I didn't have to know anything about writers like Sedgwick. Where I could read Walt Whitman and John Milton as poets, and nothing more or less. And where no-one would bother me for advice.

Oh well. I'll just have to feign guilt over becoming a sober woman who can actually understand abstract texts, and now can't imagine how she got through life without them.

And what's more...I'm enjoying this. Forget it...I'm walking on clouds. I see worlds opening up already.

Do you want to hear the wildest part of all? Other people in the class said that I was helping them to understand what we were reading. They said things like, "That didn't make sense until you talked about it." One student said, "I wondered whether I was getting any of this. But then I thought, well, Justine will explain it." And another exclaimed, "You were really on fire today. I've never seen anybody do like what you did in class." The prof thanked me, too.

The best part is that I was smiling all through that class. Someone else mentioned that, but I knew it already. I couldn't help myself. As I talked, the texts started to open up to me. And the prof not only asks great questions; she may have the best timing I've ever seen. She knows when to let people ruminate or whether to prod them a bit. As she did with me: Early in the class, she could just see that my mind was like a ripe piece of Brie ready to burst out of its wrapper.

OK. So now I'm in the kind of class I swore I would never take. And enjoying it. Better yet: The prof ended the class only after realizing it ran past its allotted time. But I didn't want it to end.

Uh-oh. Does this mean I might actually pursue a PhD after all? Then how am I going to tell all those young trannies that none of it matters?

Now I have one less way of saying "fuck you," thumbing my nose or whatever you want to call it. Not that anybody's convinced when I do that.

I guess I have to find something else now that feigning misanthropy is no longer an option. Actually, it never was, but that didn't stop me.

Have I opened a can of worms? Or a new chapter? Well, either way, I guess it'll take up a lot of the next four months. Can you imagine me going into the operating room saying things like, "The great divide is not male/female; it's homo/hetero"? I guess that'll really give the anaesthesiologist incentive to do her work.

So I'll wake up from the surgery with a body that's a closer approximation of my spirit. And after I recover, I can...take another class? And be thankful to a prof who's teaching gender theory?

It sounds good to me. Really. Really?


What do I do now?

Taking History Personally

Tonight I watched 60 Minutes. There was a time in my life when that was the only TV program I watched, and I never missed an episode. It is often informative, but more often, it's sensationalistic. But tonight there was a very interesting and disturbing segment.

Elia Solomonovich Kalperin was a town in Belarus, where he saw most of his family--including his mother--slaughtered by the Nazis when he was six years old. He would have been one of those victims, too, except that an SS soldier took a liking to him and trained him as a young soldier. He soon became a mascot and the youngest corporal in the Nazi army, leading a bunch of other kids in a propaganda film.

The Nazis gave him a new identity, naming him Alex Kurzem. Because he was so young, he soon forgot his original name and, with time, the details of his aborted childhood. For more than half a century afterward, he didn't talk about his experiences with anyone. So he lived with a name, and therefore an identity--and, therefore, by extension a bunch of stories--that weren't his.

Does any of that sound familiar?

You can imagine, if not count, how many tears streamed down my cheeks. Holocaust stories are terrible enough, even when they're about survival. I won't even pretend that I expereinced anything as traumatic as that, and I hope I don't have to. Still, those stories somehow feel personal for me.

Now, as for the other part of his story--living as someone else--I can identify with that all too well, as I suspect every transgender or anyone else who's ever lived "in the closet" can. I, too, lived with a name and identity, and thus a life, that wasn't mine. All of those things were forced on him; I would say that, under less extreme circumstances than his, I was inculcated with the idea that I was a boy called Nicky who was supposed to grow into a man people would know as Nick and who would sign his checks and other documents as Nicholas. Similarly, all those Germans who saw that propaganda film thought he wasn't part of "the hated race," as he said in the 60 Minutes interview, so they expected him to grow into a the sort of man from "the master race." The kids who saw that film were supposed to want to be him, and their parents were supposed to want their kids to grow up as he was expected to.

Take away a person's history--personal or collective--and you can dismantle him or her for your own purposes. The Nazis knew that all too well; so did Mao Tse Tung when he initiated the Cultural Revolution. So, of course, did those who bought and sold African people and forced them to work in the cotton fields and sugar plantations. As long as the slaves were forced to speak a language that wasn't their own, but weren't allowed to learn how to read or write it, or any other language, the slaves could not be anything but.

That's more or less what one of my students said in the Poetics and Rhetoric of Hip-Hop class I teach. While Elia Kaperin made it to Australia, where he survived and prospered, he was in a sense a slave, too.

It seems that slaves carry some memory, even if it isn't one of their own, of their lost personal or cultural history. That, I believe, is the common denominator of just about every cultural contribution African-Americans have made, and the reason why so much of it is expressed in music. In some sense, they're recreating the griot or its equivalents: the experience is shared and passed on through the performance of music and dance, and the telling of stories.

Elia Kaperin said there was a word that stuck in his mind through all those years: Koidanov. He had no idea of what it meant until some historian found learned that it was the old name of the village where Kaperin was born. Only then was he able to find family members who had survived--and to learn the fate of his father, about twenty years dead by then.

Through all those years I lived as Nicky, Nick and Nicholas, I carried within me an essence, a spirit, of the woman I am becoming. Sometimes it felt like a memory,though I didn't know from where or when it could have come. I was willing to believe, as I am now, that perhaps I was a girl in a past life. An Indian man I met not long after I started my transition said as much: He believed that I was indeed a woman but was sent back in a male body in order to learn what I needed to learn.

So a Jew who was, in effect, forced to become a German has something in common with Africans who were turned into slaves and a woman who had to live as a boy and a young man. Our first imperative is, of course, to survive--no, to live. To do this, we must not only resurrect personal or cultural heritages; we must create. I take that back, we can't do anything but to create, whether or not we choose to do so. We create ourselves and, in consequence, what we need to nourish ourselves intellectually and spiritually.

It's all we can do, because it's all personal.

How Do You Wait?

Got up late. Then again, I stayed up late, after reading and writing. I suppose that's a good rationale for being a night owl. After all, I'm not going to clubs and such.

So I got up late and ran a few errands. I skipped the farmer's market on Roosevelt Island, for I knew that at this time of year, they don't have much left in the early afternoon. Sometimes it even closes not much past noon at this time of the year.

And so another day passed more quickly than the ones that preceded it. Although nothing momentous happened today, I feel that I'm perceiving time a bit differently tonight.

Now there are only four months and two weeks between me and the date of the surgery. Suddenly that seems like hardly any time at all, even though so much could happen between now and the date for which my surgery is scheduled. I know I've been counting down the months, the weeks and the days, today I somehow had the sense that there really is not much time left at all.

I found myself thinking about people who have terminal illnesses and know they haven't much time left. I know their situations are very, very different from mine. But it's interesting to see how they choose to spend whatever time remains to them. There are cancer patients who refuse treatment, feeling that, as one person exclaimed, "It will give me a few more months--of what? Vomiting? Diarrhea? My hair falling out?" Then, of course there are those--probably the majority--who submit to those treatments reflexively, dutifully, hopefully or even religiously. If there's any chance of extending their lives, there's also a chance of living with it, or simply living. And, finally, there are those who go out with a bang, to the degree that they are able to, or to at least continuing to make progress in whatever areas of their lives they had been developing.

In the latter category are some people I greatly admire, including Randy Pausch and Audre Lorde. I guess I could include Lance Armstrong, too, because even though his cancer is in check, neither he nor anyone else can predict his medical future.

So what have I chosen to do in my last days before surgery? I've taken on a few new projects and other challenges. Yet I'm trying to live a "normal" life, whatever that means. All right, it's not the first time I've pursued contradictory goals. I'm teaching a course in hip-hop and poetry in which I'm trying to help students relate the two sensually rather than merely academically. Yet I'm taking a PhD level course in which I'm reading abstract writing in areas I once swore I'd never touch. That, while I find myself more and more engaged in the solitary business of writing as I am trying to deal with the social situations in which I find myself.

Of course, one way in which my situation differs from that of other people whose days are numbered is that if something isn't finished by the date of my surgery, that doesn't mean it will never be done. The operation isn't nearly as risky as it was only a generation ago, so chances are that I'll come out of it and, after the requisite period of rest and healing, I'll be ready to continue.

Still, I have this sense that I should try to finish some of my projects and tasks before the surgery. For one thing, I don't know what I'll be able--or simply feel up--to doing, and how soon after the surgery I'll be able to do some of the things in which I'm involved now.

I guess that, unless I suffer from some unexpected complication, I'll be able to read and write immediately afterward, or at least after not very many days. And although I know, from my research and conversations with my therapist, doctor and people who've done the surgery, that I'll have all the same mental faculties (Once a dumb blonde, always a dumb blonde?) and will be in many ways the same person as I was, I still wonder how and whether I'll change from the experience of the surgery or, afterward, the fact of having female body parts. Will I have the same ambitions and motivations I havve now or even, for that matter, the same interests?

Deep down, I know the answer to those last two questions is "yes." Still, there are probably so many things I can't know right now, and so much that nobody can predict. I'm guessing that I'll change in some way or another (aside from the obvious way); that is what most of us do in life. But how? What will I be like after those changes?

I think now of some poems I wrote during my youth. A few of them are still worthwhile, if I do say so myself. And I know how they could be "better" in some way or another. But I cannot change those poems: The act of writing them helped, in whatever small ways, to change me. So I would not be adding to or subtracting from them as the same person who wrote them.

Will the surgery create, or help to create, that same sort of distance between past and future selves, between who I am now (or whatever I am the day before the surgery) and the person I will be?

See what kinds of questions you start to ask when you're up late and you've read an essay about the nature of paranoia and its role in defining one's self? So I'm going to bed now. If nothing else, it'll bring me a few hours closer to my surgery.

The Cafe Orlin

After having lunch with Bruce, I met Dominick on Broadway, just above Houston. Together, we roamed through the Lower East Side and East Village, through streets were I lived, played, drank fought, got high, fucked and got fucked a lifetime ago.

The first time I roamed those neighborhoods alone was more than thrity years ago, before I knew Bruce--and before Dominick was born. Perhaps the only other streets in this world that seem as entangled within me as my arteries and veins are the ones around Dahill Road and Bay Parkway in Brooklyn, and the environs of Parc Montsouris, Ile de la Cite and Place de la Republique in Paris. I guess the block on which I've been living for six years are becoming part of my fabric, too, but that's another story.

Anyway, Dominick said he wanted to go to a restaurant near St. Mark's Place that he loves. He couldn't recall the name of it, he said, but he could take me to it.

Well, it turned out to be the Cafe Orlin. It's across the street from one of the Porto Rico stores, where I used to buy whole beans when I was still drinking coffee. And, about half a block away is Veselka, another favorite place to eat.

But having Dominick take me to the Cafe Orlin seemed like some sort of karmic twist. We were led to our table by a cute young waiter whom Dominick knows, and we were seated across from a woman who was probably a few years older than me and an intellectual of some sort. Later, Dominick said that, from the way she spoke, she seemed like she had an Ivy League, or some other sort of upper-class, background. I concurred with him; I had that sense even before she opened her mouth. She was talking about writing with a much younger Asian woman who gestured toward an Apple laptop propped between them on their table.

In my previous life, a woman like the young Asian accompanied me to the Cafe where we were all seated. And I accompanied two or three women who resembled, in various ways, the older woman who was talking about writing. Other times I went to the cafe in the company of other kinds of women. And yet another time I read my poetry there and woke up the next afternoon with yet another older woman--though not the one I was hoping to, or planning on, spending the night with.

All those times I went to the Cafe Orlin, I had a beard and wore my polo shirts or cable-knit sweaters with threadbare jeans or wrinkled chinos. As I did on what may well have been one of the strangest nights of my life.

Peggy, whom I met when I was working as a writer in residence in the city's schools, invited me and Bruce there for coffee. She brought a friend whose name I can't recall now--and, for that matter, I can scarcely even remember what she looked like.

One thing I do recall about that night was that it was just after I talked for the first time about my childhood sexual abuse. At the time, I made no connection between that revelation and being in the Cafe Orlin with Bruce, Peggy and the woman whose name is lost to me. However, I believe I revealed to Bruce the connection between the two, which I saw for the first time as I was talking to Bruce today.

Bruce and I both decided we wanted that woman. I have known him for nearly thirty years, and she was the only person who aroused our common interest. What I confessed today--before Dominick took me to that same cafe--was that the main reason I wanted her was the main reason I wanted any woman in a boy/girl relationship: I was clinging as desperately as I ever have to the idea of myself as a heterosexual man. In other words, I didn't want her so much because I found her attractive as that I wanted someone whose presence in my life would affirm me--to others, I told myself; but really to me, I knew full well--as a successful straight guy, and maybe even a bit of a stud.

On the other hand, I think Bruce wanted her because she was interesting and attractive and, well, because he is a straight (but, as they say, not narrow) man.

As it turned out, neither of us got the girl. It was probably just as well because, if I recall correctly, shortly thereafter Bruce met Carolyn, with whom he has a relationship to this day. And I continued my desultory sexual and amorous history that ended with Tammy breaking up with me for exactly the same reason we got together. That reason is, of course, the one that led me to my current life.

And it was one of the reasons why, years later, I was in that same cafe with Dominick. The waiter may not have been born yet the first time I had coffee there.

From Drizzle to Wind: Out of the Closet

Last night's drizzle turned to rain, and back to drizzle again. This morning, the weather was mild: more like what one might expect a month from now. That relative warmth lasted as long as the drizzle: as soon as the drizzle ended and the sky cleared, the wind swept through the streets of my neighborhood. And, it seemed, the season changed back to winter.

I find myself thinking, again, about Wallace Stevens' "sort of man who prefers a drizzle in Venice to a hard rain in Hartford." Or, perhaps, a fog in Boston to the doors of New York.

The fog, and especially a drizzle, are always better than a hard rain, or the cold. And the wind. Now there is only wind, and cold.

I'm recalling a photography class I took as an undergraduate. Back then, digital photography didn't exist, so we had to learn darkroom techniques. It was interesting to see how a photo could be "made" rather than simply "taken."

Well, I did something wrong when developing a roll of film. I don't remember exactly what I did, but it resulted in all of my photos on that roll of film looked as if they'd been shot in a drizzle, when in fact they were taken under clear skies or in a well-lit room.

Among those photos were portraits I made of Sharon and Alex, two of my friends in those days. That gray drizzle diffused the bright light and sharper lines that I expected to turn their faces into striking images. Instead, I ended up with photos that, because they were in black-and-white, looked like someone's feeble attempt to recreate the dreamy, but not dream-like, light one sees in cameos that are as precious and treacly as the sounds tinkling from a music box one keeps only because it belonged to someone--a grandmother or aunt, most likely--long gone.

I wonder whether I still have those photos someplace. On those occasions--rare, I admit--when I think of either Sharon or Alex, those photos are what my mind sees first.

The wind is blowing harder now. The drizzle has definitely ended, for a long while, I believe. The sky has cleared but there is no moonlight to illuminate it. There is only the wind, gusting through splintered shingles and flaking bricks in the industrial area of Long Island City that borders, on three sides, my neighborhood. The fourth side is the East River.

Tonight I spent some time with Dominick. I first met him about four years ago, but I kept him at a distance until a year or so ago. A while back, he had asked me to move into his house; I feel more and more ready to do such a thing. It occured to me, as I was talking to him, that it might be nice to begin my post-op life there, living with him.

Although we wouldn't be sharing the same room--at least not at first--the thought of moving in with him scared me--until now. Tonight I finally realized the reason why. "I was in the closet as I was lying next to Tammy, next to Eva, next to everyone," I explained. "Can you imagine what it's like to be in the closet when you're in bed with the person you're sleeping with every night?"

He couldn't, and thankfully for him, he doesn't have to. On the other hand, in all of my domestic relationships--including those with my family--I was in the closet. It's the only way I've ever known how to live with someone.

For that matter, my entire life until five years ago was lived "in the closet." Even when I was in one of Allen Ginsberg's workshops, I felt as if I were presenting a persona I invented. I think Allen knew that: He said that my writing wouldn't really develop until I dealt with my sexuality and ideas about gender.

But even in his class, I remained in the closet. It was all I knew how to do; furthermore, the rest of that class consisted of straight males and one straight female. I never spoke frankly with them about anything, not even poetry--theirs, mine or the ones in the canon. Mine were shrouded in fog and drizzle that faded into a linen haze.

So now I'm taking a class called Literature, Gender and Sexuality taught by a wonderful lesbian professor who has as much belief in my abilities as any instructor I've ever had. Yet, until this week, I was ready to drop it. I'd fallen behind on my reading because I was resisting it. Yes, some of the essays assume knowledge I don't have, and others are written in dense, abstract language that contain scarcely a metaphor, let alone a simile or a vibrant image. But that language is not the reason I wasn't keeping up.

Before I began to read the material for the class, I had to overcome my resistance to the ideas I've always had about gender studies and academic research--particularly in fields like mine--generally. Back in the day, I'd read some really trite stuff in what was then called women's studies and gay studies. Trite, and expressed in utter monstrosities of prose. I know I wasn't the only person turned off. But when I fought registering for the course, then reading the material, I was reacting only to the unpleasantness of my memories of the subject, even though I can't recall the specifics of what I read back in the day.

In other words, I have nothing but the fog that shrouded my memory of early gender and gay studies. And, of course, the shadow of who I was when I sneered at what I was only making gestures of reading. What else could I do? There isn't much light to read by when you're in the closet.

Staying in the closet so I could avoid the wind and cold didn't work for me, and won't now. All I can do is find the warmest coat that fits me best, and go out into the wind.

Wanted

On the campus where I teach, there's a promenade that seperates a Colonial-era cemetery from the grounds of St. Monica's Church, which dates back to 1857. Mario Cuomo was baptized there, and it is being converted to a performing space for the college.

Tonight, as walked that way, a light drizzle floated through the air and misted the stones of that church, graveyard and promenade with the soft haze of streetlamps that line the path. The air wasn't cold; the drizzle felt like some sort of truce with winter.

The promenade ends underneath a Long Island Rail Road (Yes, this Rail Road is two words.) overpass with fluorescent lights that make the color of the walls garish, when they would only be drab during the day. As I approached that overpass, I felt sad: as if a temporary reprieve, a night of freedom, were about to end.

And, of course, a stage of my life is going to end soon: less than five months from now. But I feel that other things are ending now, too.

I can't help but to feel that when I'm at the college. As I've mentioned before, I have become more student-oriented than I had been. The college itself seems more and more like a prison, or at least an asylum--until I set foot in a class I'm about to teach.

And what happens when I get in front of a classroom? No matter how well I prepare myself, I still feel the same nervousness I felt the first day I taught. I feel naked and someone is going to find one of my many flaws.

Today was no different in that respect. But, once I (with the help of one of my students) got the laptop and projector to work, I somehow felt that everything was as it should be.

It wasn't just a matter of "everything falling into place." Today I had students read from two poems by John Skelton: "The Tunning of Eleynor Rumming" and "To Mistress Margaret Hussey." Without my explaining, they understood why: I could hear it in the way they were reading. And, when I talked about the line and rhyme structure, and how they're similar to "rap" songs, everybody understood.

What surprised me was how much the students actually wanted to talk about the poems, and how they discerned what the three-beat (or three-stress) line does to the mood of the poem or song.

Later, we watched a video of The Last Poets' "N***az Are Afraid of Revolution." As I expected, much of the class time was taken up with a discussion of The 'N' Word." Students not only talked about their feelings about the word, but how it's changed over the years.

Most of the students in that class are African- or Caribbean-American, so they had strong feelings about that word. I made the connection to the way the word "queer" is used by straight people and members of the LGBT community.

The students actually brought the discussion back to the poems and songs. One woman, whose younger sister accompanied her to the class, said something really interesting: The Last Poets were talking about shared histories and experiences of oppression, so their use of the N-word came out of what they shared with black members of their audience. That is why the word sounds different than it would from the lips of most white people.

In that class, I didn't feel like I was teaching. Rather, the class felt like a very spirited conversation. That, after I was afraid that I was boring them.

And at the end of class, a number of students made a point to tell me they'd leared so much today. From the brief in-class assignment they did today, I can tell they actually did learn quite a bit.

Speaking of classes, I am staying in the one in which I'd enrolled. I talked with the prof, who said that she actually values my contributions to the class. And she told me not to worry or to give myself a crash course in gender theory: Essentially, she advised me to trust my understanding of what we read.

Now I realize that my anxieties about the class I'm taking, and the one I'm teaching (the one I mentioned in this blog) were not about my appropriateness for either one. Deep down, I knew I belonged in both. And that scared me; I'm not used to that.

OK. So now I'm in a class where the prof and students want me, and I'm teaching a class in which the students want to be. Some told me they signed up for that course because I was scheduled to teach it. And, yes, they want me for the right reasons.

So I'm not a misfit, after all. What do I do now?

Days, Events and Tasks

Max is nosey. Or maybe he's afraid. As I was about to start writing this, he stood in front of my keyboard. I had to shoo him away, which I really don't like to do to him or Charlie. They never did anything bad to me; all they ever do is make me happy. Really, they can't do anything else. After all, I don't think any mouse will even come near this place.

Sometimes Charlie comes between me and my keyboard. He has that right. I wonder if he knows what I'm doing. He and Max know that whatever I'm doing, it's taking attention away from them.

So why am I talking about them? Well, I gotta blame somebody if I don't write The Great American Novel tonight. Right?

Tomorrow I go back to teaching and that class I'm taking. I can remember when every day that passed was simply another day gone; it continued for me only in whatever memories or impressions I retained. Then, I came to feel that every day was another day I survived. Then, later still, it was a day I survived clean and sober. Then the days simply passed again.

And now every day is another day closer to my surgery. Actually, as I've written that, I've felt another shift: Each class, each task I do, every errand I run or anything I do for fun brings me closer to my surgery. This is fulfilling, sad and beautiful all at once. All I want to do is get to my surgery. At the same time, I wonder whether I'll look back at this time and life and wish I'd done everything better. I very often feel that way about my past, even when I know full well that I couldn't have done anything differently.

Or, for that matter, that anything could have been different. I was talking with Dominick about something that happened to me in my childhood that affected a lot of what I did--and felt--for many years afterward. He marvelled, "You've been through a lot. You're so strong." Of course, I told him otherwise: At my best, I do the best I know how to do; at my worst, I look for the path of least resistance. Sometimes I take that path before I do what's best. I guess that's what lots of people do, so I don't see how it makes me special.

I mean, really, about 75,000 other people in this country have had gender reassignment surgery. So I'm not so unusual. I'm just a middle-aged woman who does what she can. The funny thing is, some people think I'm enduring hardship in making my transition toward my surgery. What they don't realize is that in some way, everything before I started my transition was more difficult. Then, I was constantly in pain and depressed; now, whatever hardships I endure at least have some sort of boundary: They begin and end; their reach is finite.

At least that's how it's been. What these next few months will bring, I don't know.

If I'm as strong as Dominick and other people think I am, it's only to protect myself: I am still way more vulnerable than he or almost anyone else realizes I am.

If I'm so damned strong, why was I stressing out over that class I'm taking? At its worst, it's another place where I'm a misfit and trying to do things to which I'm not suited. Neither situation is new to me, so I should be able to deal with it. After tomorrow, I'll be in that class or I won't. Either way, I'm not sure that it will make much difference for my future. I'll still come home to Charlie and Max. Maybe some day, someone else will also be at the door. Or I'll be there for someone else who's about to leave another day behind.