‘Will you go buy me a pack of cigarettes at Sun’s before you sit down?’ my mother begs me. ‘I’ve been drinking so I can’t drive!’ It’s not a good excuse because she is always drinking and therefore is never fit to drive.
Sun’s is a small convenience store at the bottom of our road in Topanga, selling an eye-opening if not alarming array of goods ranging from almond oil to organic cat food to processed jerky. I walk down the aisles of the store, wondering if, since I don’t want to be here, it might be exactly that moment when something big happens that changes my life. Realizing no one else is in there except for the owner, a sweetly worn man named Sunny, I head to the checkout to buy my mom’s smokes.
I had been feeling so good with Mary just moments ago but my mother’s bitterness has burned me a bit, and now I can’t shake it off. She can stop a party as well as she can start it. There’s this seed she’s planted in me that’s growing, that’s needling my insides, urging me to water it but I won’t. If I do, it might grow too big. It might grow so big it will push all of me out of my own body until it overtakes me all together. Basically, and I say this without being dramatic, I’ll die.
I’m still aiming for the top; for the man I hope for, because even if Dorothy’s lines masticate at my insides, vowel by vowel, twisting me, the truth is that she must have known there was something to hope for, to pray for, in order to know she didn’t get it. She knew it existed or else she wouldn’t know there was a deficit. Thinking about it, I dodged a bullet with the Al Pacino lookalike. Miguel was definitely not what I had hoped for.
Just as Sunny hands me my change, the pennies slotting into the cracks between my fingers, Delina and Julia walk in, my pseudo aunties, their backs straight, unabashedly bright. They are dressed, as always, in women’s clothes. I call them pseudo aunties because of the lack of blood relation, but my mother is an only child and they are her best friends, so it works. I use the she pronoun with them because that’s what they are now: they’re women. Delina’s an ex-pat British transgender woman and Julia’s from Spain, also a transgender woman, and both are in their early seventies. They aren’t together, they’re just friends. Best friends, they say.
Delina wears a trench coat in lilac (she loves pastels), with wedges to give her height (a must for a woman, she insists), with wild, frizzy, electric-purple hair. She doesn’t wear make-up except for lipstick because she says she doesn’t want to do anything to distract from her lips, but really it’s because she’s lost all her eyelashes. Delina looks like a grandmother and walks around freely, proudly, unapologetically. It’s taken her years to get here, and she feels great.
‘For Heaven’s sake, a goddess is among us, Julia!’ Delina screams out, raising her hands over her head as she spots me. Shuffling towards me in shoes that don’t quite fit. Shifting. Bopping. Deliriously happy, a meerkat on speed, and one of my favorite people.
‘I’m so happy to see you!’ I explode.
They are the two people I seek out when I need a pep talk because they’ve already lived many lives and therefore have great advice, like my very own Gandalfs. The only issue is that they can read me too well, they can pick up on everything, and being that I’m an atrocious liar around people I know, I might as well be translucent when I’m around them. They also happen to be clairvoyants and astrologers.
‘Hola, mamacita!’ cries Julia, popping out from behind Delina’s subdued garb, leaning in to inspect me. She grabs my face and kisses my cheeks as Delina holds on to my hands. Warming them up as if it were winter. As if it were winter in Vermont.
‘Ay, Delina,’ Julia says, spotting something in me she doesn’t like. ‘Tabbycita’s got something going on I don’t like so much.’ Delina joins her up close; nods her head. Calculating.
‘You are looking so much like your mother the older you get,’ Delina says. ‘You look like a movie star!’ I don’t look bad, but I still know this is an exaggeration. ‘Are you going to tell us what’s going on or am I going to have to borrow Sunny’s chair to sit down while you make me wait?’ She is so pushy.
‘I thought I was close to love today,’ I spill, their eagerness to talk opening me up. ‘I keep messing up, though. I don’t mean to hurt anyone, but I think I’m coming at them from angles they don’t expect. I’m going about it the wrong way somehow but I’m just wracking my brain and can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. Maybe it’s because I get a little too excited?’
‘If getting too excited is a sin then I’m going straight to Hell!’ Delina says. She and Julia look at each other and start making sad faces, experimenting with the depths their frowns can reach.
‘Oh my God,’ Julia says. ‘It’s so ugly! I hate being sad!’
‘Me too!’ Delina adds, feigning melancholy. ‘Look, you could settle with a numbnut like that.’ She stops to point to a really good-looking guy getting out of a Hummer SUV in the parking lot, snapping her fingers for emphasis. ‘But would you want that? No!’
I’m thinking, Yes? Maybe? But I know what she means.
‘You know what? I think it’s because you don’t want it yet,’ Julia surmises, her eyes flying around her sockets as she returns to Inspector Gadget mode. ‘Ah, that’s it. Delina, she’s not ready.’ She’s been saying I’m not ready for years.
‘One day someone is gonna get that bonkers brain of yours,’ Delina says. ‘Don’t change! Until then, just live! Enjoy!’
‘Let’s live!’ Julia exclaims. Sunny isn’t even paying attention.
‘You know,’ I say, feeling better. Feeling like I didn’t make a mistake. ‘When I think about it, I knew he wasn’t the one from the get go. I just wanted him to be so right that I made my idea of him fit the reality I chose . . .’
‘Well that’s it!’ Julia yells passionately. ‘It’s all a choice! Love, happiness; they are all choices and you’re making the choice to be happy.’
‘Here’s the truth,’ Delina says as she leans back against a wall of tampons because her legs are getting tired. Every now and then her knees give out. You’ll be talking to her and you’ll be thinking, Where’d Delina go? And then you look down. ‘It took us most of our lives to realize that the only way to be happy was to be true to ourselves. Of course, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. We knew we’d find it a struggle to deal with the bastards who’d make fun of us, the stares, the homophobia, even our families who might not understand, but really, who cares? We’re happy.’
‘We’re just three proud women,’ Julia says, beaming. Grabbing us both by the shoulder in solidarity. ‘Three happy women.’
Delina and Julia have parallel stories despite not becoming friends until they were about fifty years old. Delina was married for thirty-three years, as a straight man, to a woman named Trixie and together they had six children: Peter (forty-nine), Georgie (forty-six), Polly (forty-two), Henry (thirty-nine), Ruthie (thirty-six) and Harriet, the youngest (thirty-three). All of them have come around to accepting their dad as their other mom. As it’s been revealed to me, Delina was originally Donald and was a banker in London straight out of university. He went to a good school though he was never aristocratic, hailing from a well-educated middle-class family. He met Trixie at a dance in 1963 when he was twenty-two years old, and they got married a year later and popped out Peter. Delina says she never even thought about being gay or not, not only because it wasn’t an option at that time, but because it was more an issue of sexual identity than orientation. Before she realised she was playing the wrong role, she thought that was just what love and marriage was supposed to feel like: empty. Unsexual. Towards the end of their marriage, in the last few years I think, Delina started going through Trixie’s closet. A pair of stockings under a suit here, a bra under a shirt there . . . until eventually he started wearing her earrings to work. That was the dead giveaway. Trixie couldn’t ignore it at that point, and, after what I hear was about six months of hysterical crying, they began their ending. Trixie soon after remarried and Donald dumped his banking life to study numerol
ogy, collect healing crystals, move to California and change his name to Delina.
When Delina laughs, she laughs with her whole body, curves over, sometimes frighteningly. At times I’ve known her to heave. Each laugh comes out like a bullet, making you jump. You’re silent, shocked, as you digest the shrieking that inevitably follows. It takes getting used to, but it’s infectious. You can’t help but love her and want her to be your aunt. Her last name is Hart. Delina Hart. She hasn’t been in a relationship since she had her gender reassignment surgery ten years ago.
And then we have Julia. Julia Garcia from Madrid. Julia used to be Julio (makes sense, not too imaginative a name change), and was an insurance salesman married to a Spanish woman named Rosa. They had three children together: Juan (thirty-eight), Talia (thirty-four) and Javier (thirty-two). I re-call Julia’s transition being similar to Delina’s in that it all started quite casually, quite slowly, until it became so obvious it was unavoidable. It wasn’t just an elephant in the room. He was a bedazzled, high-heeled and false-eyelash-wearing elephant. Julio moved to London after he felt he couldn’t be Julia in Madrid, and one night out in Soho, he befriended Delina and ended up following her to California. The ‘land of the free-sexuals!’ they love to say while driving down Pacific Coast Highway from Topanga back to West Hollywood; their thin, brittle hair under chiffon scarves, blowing in the wind like Thelma and Louise gone awry. I’m not quite sure what happened to Rosa, but I’m sure she’s fine. I’m sure she cried, too, but she’s fine. Women are always okay. We cry but we get over it. It’s the men we have to worry about.
‘So what you’re saying is,’ I ask, just to be sure I understand them, ‘is that even if people think I am crazy, even if I am going about this all the wrong way, it doesn’t matter as long as I’m being authentic to myself?’ They are nodding throughout my recap so I know they agree; they know they got through to me.
‘For years, we lived the way everyone else told us to,’ Delina says. ‘We did what was expected. We didn’t shout too loudly—’
‘No we didn’t!’ Julia interrupts.
‘—we lived inside the lines, we were black and white, we fit in, but we were forgettable. We were miserable because we weren’t being ourselves at the risk of causing a stir. Never change, darling. You’ve always been you and you have to keep being that divine creature you’ve always been.’ She slips off the tampon shelf abruptly, it no longer comfortably able to support her. A few boxes fall and Sunny rolls his eyes.
‘Cleanup, aisle one,’ he says to someone in the back.
‘I mean,’ Julia says, wrapping it up as I can tell she’s getting tired too. ‘It will pay off in the end. Just look at us!’
And I do. I look at them for a while because they’re so magnetic it’s impossible not to. They leave me with no choice but to see how I must keep being myself as it’s unmistakably, unequivocally, the only road open. Besides, all the other turnoffs along the way have been closed. No one warns you there might be roadblocks at every exit and that you might have to drive to the next town before you can turn around.
Delina grabs me by the arm just before I go. She’s much stronger than she looks and often forgets the power in her wrists. ‘Just remember,’ she says, gripping tightly, ‘one man’s crazy is another man’s dream.’ Delina and Julia are my gasstation pit stops along this dimly lit path, keeping me straight and narrow; giving me somewhere to pull over and refuel before I break down further along the road. I’m pumped now, energized and ready to get back behind the wheel and drive, drive, drive.
The Rastafarian
Lately, I just can’t get the image of dicks out of my head. Every bus ride I take, every elevator I get into, every supermarket line I wait in, I size up dicks. Old dicks, young dicks, big dicks, small dicks. It all started when I got a text from an unknown number with a picture of a big, black penis. I was walking down the street when the beep lured me in and the picture caught me by surprise. It took my breath away; made me dizzy. So loopy, I literally almost walked into a pole in the middle of the sidewalk. Now I know what it feels like to be stopped in my tracks, not just by signposts but by dick pics, too.
There was no face, no text – only a beautiful penis peeking out from colorfully patterned bed linens with a few fingers around it so it didn’t just look like a floating dick. It filled up the entire screen. You look at it and Pow! A penis. Right there, just staring back at you. Every time I’d glance at it, I would cover my mouth and giggle, my smile surfacing between the cracks in my fingers like that dick did among its disheveled pile of sheets. It was like having a huge secret that only you can keep. You feel big just holding it in you.
I’ve never even searched for dick pics online. Not that I didn’t want to, I just never thought about it. At first of course I imagined it was a prank from one of those porn telemarketers. So tentatively, naturally, calmly, I replied, ‘Hi.’ If you had asked me earlier what I would have replied to this kind of text, I would have thought I’d use an exclamation point. ‘Hi!’ felt a lot more appropriate. It matched the level of arousal that cycled, virtually, between us. But, because I didn’t know him and because I didn’t want him to think I was too keen, too soon, I avoided the exclamation. For the next hour, I couldn’t stop looking at his two-dimensional cock – so strangely alien, so exciting – and then searching the faces of passersby to see who I could share it with. I wanted to scream with joy and run up to strangers and shake them because I believed in them and in their ability to be alive in the way I felt alive.
But no one made eye contact with me, despite my peering, so I kept on moving forward. I frantically plugged the photo into Google images to search and see if any other penises matched so I could determine whether or not it was indeed a porn telemarketer or just some man clowning. Some lonely guy in India texting numbers he got from a call-center station he worked at, thinking his own penis wouldn’t incite such a visceral reaction. At least I knew he was smart, either way. No images matched my pic so I knew it was real, and it definitely wasn’t photoshopped because it had this cute little bend to the left, which I found quite endearing. It was full of character. Straight penises are so dull! ‘Veering left,’ I’d say to him when we’d be united in the flesh, as I’d pretend to drive his stick. I imagined what he looked like, how his neck and head and chest and hands all fit into each other like a perfectly designed puzzle.
About an hour later, I got a text back saying, ‘What up hot gyal’ but the question mark at the end must have been cut off. I wondered if he wasn’t very grammatically minded, or if he was lazy or if indeed it was just a texting malfunction. I hoped for the latter.
‘Do I know you?’ I asked.
‘Don’t remember me?’
I’m pretty sure I’d remember a charmingly asymmetrical dick, so I said, ‘No.’
Two minutes later, I got another reply: ‘Met u outside the Mexican place on Franklin in Hollywood a few years ago. Your so beautiful.’
I still couldn’t quite recall the moment he was referring to because all I could think about was how he incorrectly used ‘your’ when it should have been ‘you’re.’ Poor grammar kills me but he thought I was beautiful so he had my interest, and maybe he was cleverly giving me an in, showing me how I was needed in his life: sexpot and grammar teacher to the rescue.
‘Are you sure you’re not in India, feeling lonely?’ I asked, just to be sure I was ruling it out. You have to be sure these days; there are so many creeps out there.
‘DWRCL,’ he replied.
‘Ha,’ I wrote back, having no idea what he meant. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘Dead wid raas claat laff.’
I’m not sure if that was meant to clarify anything because I still had no idea what he was talking about. As I phonetically tried to work it out, bending my lips around the vowels, looking like I was warming up for vocal lessons, I realized what his accent was.
‘Oh!’ I exclaimed. ‘Are you Jamaican?’
‘Yah.’
Fab
ulous. I love Jamaicans.
‘What r u doin?’ he asked, texting me again before I had a chance to reply. That’s guy code for: I’m interested.
‘Why’d it take you so long to contact me?’ I had to know. I had to figure this out. I felt like Sherlock Holmes in an erotic novel called On the Hunt for the Face of the Man with the Fantastic Cock.
‘Cuz I was scared,’ he said. I love a man who can own his emotions. I also want a man who is strong and capable and doesn’t show his feelings to just anyone because he’s so tough and rugged. That combination exists and this guy, he could be the one who embodies such a rare and delicate balance of sensitivity and manliness. I put the phone down for a minute as I let it sink in. My good karma is coming back.
Then another pic came through. This time it was more of a close-up, with some balls in the shot. The only problem now, though, was that his dick was half-hard.
‘Did I do something wrong?’ I replied.
‘Naaah. Why?’
‘You lost your hard-on,’ I said, hoping he’d tell me how to make this right again. ‘I’ve never had phone sex before, so you’ll have to coach me a bit.’
‘Ur turn now,’ he wrote.
The exhilaration of the request disoriented me so. Every cell in my body was having the best party of their lives. They were so happy; they were even dancing the salsa, my cells. Everything was on fire, including my groin, despite not knowing what my turn meant.
‘What do you mean?’ I replied. ‘Like a picture of me?’
The Optimist Page 9