Pure

by Linda Kay Klein

  Eli nodded. “It’s not ‘this specific thing that happened when I was nine is the problem.’ It’s not like that. It’s just . . . I was for so many years in that environment that I feel like I was really strongly affected by it. Just, in general. I should stop being nostalgic and pining away for this community that probably wants nothing to do with me anymore anyway,” Eli said.

  Then he turned to the window and stopped talking.

  * * *

  I. Though this was Eli’s wish, as they say, “you’ve met one trans person, you’ve met one trans person.” In other words, every trans person is different and it’s best to check in with someone about how they want to be referred to at various points in their lives.

  II. Eli has asked me to share that although the person he was dating was living as female at the time, the individual has also transitioned since then.

  12

  * * *

  The G(od) Spot

  “Big emotional cannons started going off after I told you some of my story on the phone,” Scarlet admitted. She sank down into the beloved orange couch that she had told me she’d carried with her from apartment to apartment over ten years. An abstract artist who referred to painting as her first language, Scarlet wore a pair of black leggings, black leg warmers, a black T-shirt, and long silver earrings. Her hair was tied up to one side with long tendrils hanging around her face, and her feet were bare.

  “Flashes of fear, flashes of anxiety, of memory,” she continued, leaning into my space opposite her on the couch. “But super-fast, like a billionth of a second—boom, boom, boom—I saw maybe twenty parts of my life or my history.”

  Doctors and nurses screaming . . . the certainty that she was about to die . . . waking up in the hospital bed . . . seeing the photojournalist . . . seeing her sexy red underwear discarded on a chair . . .

  “Like a flip book,” I suggest.

  “Yes. Punctuated at the end. Like when you’re in an airplane with turbulence and it drops really fast and your stomach drops. Kind of like that at the end. Jarring panic that was unfounded because what happened, it already happened!

  I have synesthesia, which means I relate colors with experiences or feelings or concrete things like days or people—definitely people, months, years. And The Incident with the Photojournalist—that’s what I call it—it’s like an open circle. No top and no bottom. It’s just, like, black. This black thing. Growing up was afternoon sunshine and hot pink and peaches sky. You are earth tones in sienna and umbers with a thread of creams, Linda. I’m reds, mostly darker wines changing into crimsons and scarlets. But The Incident with the Photojournalist is just black.”

  * * *

  “I was a very late bloomer,” Scarlet, who had been raised in the southern part of the Midwest, said when I asked her to go back to the beginning. “I was chubby. I was wearing my combat boots and writing poetry. I was in theater. Surprise!” She laughed. “And I’ve always been a very sexual person. As I got older, my baby fat rolled off and I got a do-over genetically. I have a really sexual, curvy body.”

  But having grown up in the evangelical church, Scarlet guarded that sexual, curvy body like “a little woodland creature. Like a bunny in my hands that I had to keep safe while walking on a delicate, little, tiny tightrope. Keeping it safe was supposed to be the most important thing, right? It’s so easy to misstep; it’s so easy to fall. And if you fall, the whole thing is going to explode into this big avalanche of fire and death and nightmares. Really! That’s how it’s really presented! At the time, it sort of made sense because it seemed like you had to protect it because it’s so sacred. But in the meantime, my body was like,” Scarlet threw her head back and growled from the pit of her stomach, shaking her head from side to side. Then she looked back at me and smiled: “It was ready to rock.”

  During her twenties, Scarlet attended art school, launched a career as a professional artist, and engaged in a series of intense, monogamous relationships with evangelical men: “Adam was bonfire crimson, oranges and black; Evan was an indigo blue changing into metallic blue-gray; Ben was a midnight blue and flare of auburn.” Though she didn’t have penis-in-vagina sex with any of these men, she went what she referred to as “99.9 percent” of the way with them.

  “I would cry because I was so lost. I loved being sexual and it felt so right but I knew, ‘This is so bad. I’m going to have to suffer because this is what I’ve done.’ ” The feeling manifested physically for the first time when she was in college.

  “One day I went to my anthropology class and I was feeling really weird. I started low-level shaking. I went back to my room and my heart just started beating so fast. I’d never felt anything like this. I couldn’t stop it. The shaking took on a greater rising. Then I remember I tried to stand up and I fell on the ground. I thought I was having a heart attack. I really thought that I might be having a heart attack. I called one of my closest friends. He ran over to my apartment and took me to—I can’t remember. But I ended up at the hospital. A doctor gave me Valium which made my body be like—” Scarlet made the sound of a robot shutting down, collapsing her body into a heap in her lap. “The doctor was a Greek woman who I really liked,” Scarlet continued. “She asked, ‘Can you tell me what you think brought this on?’

  “I said, ‘I think I’m not supposed to be with my boyfriend.’ I recognized how embarrassing that was to say when I was in the hospital, but I really thought this is what brought it on.

  “I hadn’t told her anything about myself, but her second question to me was, ‘Did you have sex with him for the first time? And do you feel ashamed and bad about that?’ ”

  “I wonder what led her to see somebody having a panic attack and think—”

  “I grew up in a very, very evangelical state,” Scarlet interrupted me. “It is a hotbed of evangelicalism. Almost everybody there. There are almost no liberal Christian people, really, at all,” Scarlet said, seemingly implying that she might not be the first person this doctor saw whose religious sexual shame manifested as a panic attack. “I was scared to even answer her,” Scarlet continued. “I was like Bill Clinton: ‘Have I had sexual relations? What is the definition of “relations”? Have I had “sex”? I’ve had oral sex.’ I remember asking these questions of myself. Eighty-five percent of the rest of the university is having full-on sex and probably a portion of them are having orgies, and threesomes, and crazy stuff. And I’m literally going to the hospital because I’ve had oral sex with my boyfriend. For real!”

  “So the doctor’s question struck at some truth in you.”

  “Of course! But my answer to the doctor was still ‘no.’ Because I was holding desperately onto being a virgin at the time. The doctor said, ‘I’m not going to tell your mom and dad; it’s better if you tell me than if you don’t; it’s totally natural; you’re nineteen years old.’ She was very loving and sweet. I remember she made me feel very human, confident and strong, even when I felt completely messed up and crazy. She definitely didn’t believe me about not having had sex, and she shouldn’t have.

  “The doctor was like, ‘This was a classic anxiety attack.’ She had been seeing my grandma and my parents and said, ‘Anxiety attacks run in your family. You’re probably going to have them for the rest of your life.’ Anxiety disorders do run in my family,” Scarlet informed me, “but definitely all my experiences in the evangelical church set all of those nodules on fire for me.”

  Finally, Scarlet met Chris: “moss green and dark river blues and earth tones.”

  Scarlet and Chris dated “an epic, a whole eon,” she told me. Seven years. “He was the male version of me in terms of sexuality. Desperately, deeply wanting it, but Chris had a much scarier, cutthroat religious voice in his head. There’s a whole different version of shame that goes on with guys too. Meanwhile, I kept growing closer and closer to being ready. Finally, a little over a year into Chris and my relationship, I was twenty-five and I just wanted to. I remember it was a very quiet night, very calm.
I totally trusted him. I didn’t feel any shame whatsoever after it. None. But he would do a pendulum—‘I can’t, we shouldn’t be doing this’—that lasted our whole relationship, which was very hard for me. So after seven years, I ended it.”

  By the time Scarlet broke up with Chris, she no longer considered herself an evangelical, in large part because of the way in which the church separated the body from the mind and the spirit. “The sexual and the spiritual had always felt like one to me,” she explained. “And in my twenties I came to a new spiritual identity, a new place in which I saw sexuality as embodied in the supernatural mystery.”

  Having come to see sexuality as an integral part of the spiritual experience, Scarlet was no longer willing to be part of a religion—or a relationship—that would restrict her spiritual life by restricting her sexual life. And so, she grieved the loss of her relationship. And then, six months later, she got online.

  “My friend helped me create an OkCupid profile. I put it up and it was explosive. I had no idea. There was a whole world I didn’t understand. The best way to describe it is I kind of felt like I was at a party when I was twenty-five, the age I was when I started dating Chris, and I’d fallen asleep in a room. And I woke up at the party seven years later and walked outside and nobody I knew was at the party anymore. It was a very strange sensation. People were writing me left and right. Really crazy, weird people. It was very daunting.

  “And then this dude wrote me who was hot. Really, really hot. But also seemed really earthy. He was an artist. His work is absolutely gorgeous. He used to be a photojournalist covering international conflict and now he is a fine art photographer. He was one of the very few I actually wrote back. Deep autumn-day sky-blue and a rapid mosaic of grainy colors to jet black,” she said.

  Eventually, they scheduled a date. “I remember every tiny little thing about getting ready. I was excited. I was very, very attracted to him. I remember all of it. Then when I saw him, I was stunned. I was blown away. I learned later, you’re never quite sure when you meet people online exactly what they’re going to look like. He was way more attractive than the picture. I had to realign quickly.”

  Over dinner, the photojournalist, as she called him, told Scarlet stories about his life that made her fall for him even harder. When it was her turn to tell her story, she tentatively mentioned that she was raised an evangelical Christian. In reply, “he told me that he had people very close to him who were also raised in an evangelical home and church, and he was actually very defensive of their experience with other people.” Sensitive to binary-based judgmentalism, as many of the former evangelicals I know are, his words sent a chill down Scarlet’s spine. “He had no idea how big of a turn-on that was for me. And then he just kissed me out of the blue when I least expected it. Just started kissing me. Touch-wise, hunger-wise, we are made of the exact same things. No question. His past and my past, completely different. But how we were as sexual animals was identical.”

  Over the coming weeks, they texted, talked on the phone, had lunch, and when he had a crisis one day, it was her that he called for help. “A bond had begun to form,” Scarlet summed things up. Then one day he asked her if she wanted to see his apartment. “I went over there and it was amazing,” she gushed. “He’d created this beautiful environment. He had built all of these things. We went into his backyard and I remember looking at all of the millions of plants he had planted while his two cats were wandering around being lovely and affectionate. It’s all slow motion to me in my memory. This whole time at his apartment, right before, I remember every tiny, little thing in slow motion.

  “It was gray out, and spitting rain a little bit, but nothing bad. He looked out and stood on the porch. He didn’t say a word, but his eyes were like, the only way I’ve ever described it to my best friend is they were like ‘Wolf Sex Eyes.’ They were! He just stood there, eyeing me in this primal way. I’ve never experienced anything like that.

  I barely got back up to the step with him. It was absolutely crazy. Things on the table. It was really wild and awesome and I was so into it. It was like a movie, it really was. And I was completely loving it. It was that one time in my life I was like, ‘Yes!’ In that moment, I was like, ‘This. Is. Me!’ ” she said, slapping her palms on her legs as she hit each word, as though grounding herself in the experience. “This is the part of who I’ve always been that I’ve wanted to sink my teeth into! I want to be doing this; I should be doing this; he wants to do this; and we are doing this.’

  “That was the very first time I had ever experienced that wildfire with absolutely no regrets whatsoever in my body or his body. He had this really cool bedroom with this huge, fluffy, European bed thing. Of course, right? And I had on my hot red panties and maybe my bra was still on. And then a streak went through me, a millisecond in the middle of it where my old self was seeing what was about to happen, and I was like ‘This is about to happen, I’m really about to—’ It was like a lightning bolt striking through me. He only had boxers on at that point. Then they came off and the flash was gone and I was totally unaware of anything like that existing in the world.

  “It was just incredible, and otherworldly in every way. It truly was real ecstasy, an out-of-body experience. Then I remember we laid in his bed and talked for a long time. Then there was a whole second round. The second time was even better than the first time! I was loving it. I was like, ‘I’m probably going to be here all day!’ That was maybe one of my very favorite times in my whole life. Ironically. Because then it was over, I was totally laying there, tingling kind of, again in this otherworldly place. I was happy. Not connected to the earth at all. Floating . . .”

  And then the photojournalist got up to go to the bathroom. As he stood, Scarlet saw that he wasn’t wearing a condom. “I knew that he had put on a condom the first time because I watched it, but when he stood up after the second time, it was like the bottom dropped out inside of me. I was so unbelievably turned on and then it was like the record scratching.

  “I said, ‘Wait, were you not wearing a condom?’ And he was like, ‘No.’ I remember, in a weird way, he looked equally shocked that I was shocked. Even though, I now personally feel like his response was BS. He was like, ‘I thought we were in this wild phase and we made this eye contact, and I thought that you knew that that’s what I wanted to do and you wanted to do it too.’ Saying we had this extensive conversation with our eyes that I was not aware of.”

  Suddenly, the panic set in. Diseases, pregnancy, all of the threats Scarlet had been warned would befall her if she had sex outside of marriage flooded her mind “like a cloud of locusts or something from the Bible, a black storm from Hell. I was desperately trying to look normal. I was trying to say in a totally natural way, ‘Have you been tested?’ I was too scared to ask him, ‘Do you regularly have sex without condoms with people that you barely know?’ I’d never thought of these secular things before. I was like, ‘What am I doing? I don’t even speak this language. I’m so ashamed. I’m so embarrassed.’ I was trying to say to myself, ‘Okay, okay, okay. This is the irrational side. You are on the irrational side, for sure. This is the far end of the irrational side. Reality is probably in between.’ I was trying to ground myself, but my brain kept being like, ‘You barely know this person! You don’t even know him!’

  “And then, I distinctly remember him saying, ‘Wait, there is . . . What’s on your back?’ I reached around and it felt like an enormous mosquito bite the size of your palm. And then I looked and they were on my arms, like this—” She took half of the rind of a large orange that she and I had split earlier and placed it all over her body to demonstrate the size of the welts. “And I am watching them rise on my stomach, on my breasts, like a horror movie. And then my coughing—I was struggling to breathe, to catch air, and this was all escalating so quickly.

  “He was like, ‘Oh my God, what is happening? Go and get in the shower. Maybe you’re allergic to my detergent or something. If you wash it off, maybe it
will alleviate it or something.’

  “I was like, ‘Okay, okay.’ And I ran completely naked through this guy’s apartment to the shower, and that’s the first time I looked down at my vagina and I was like—” Scarlet breathed in abruptly. “I gasped. I’ve never gasped before in my life. It was like—” She cupped her palms and held them, face up, side by side, the edges of her pinkies touching.

  “That large? Are you kidding me? How is that possible?” I asked.

  “Probably that’s how it is when people give birth,” she said. “Blown up. Open. The size of both of my palms open. I would say it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I had no idea what was happening to me. And my legs, my face, everything was bright red. It felt like I had absolutely no control over these horrific, nightmarish things that were happening to my body. That’s when the ringing in my ears started. I couldn’t hear anything. Just like after a concert, when you can’t hear? Like that, exactly like that. I stumbled outside. The door was open. The photojournalist was standing there. I stumbled out and I said, ‘I have to go to an emergency room.’

  “He was like, ‘Let me go and get you Benadryl. I think maybe if you drink some Benadryl, it will stop.’ And I could hear his voice like a faraway, faint angel voice through the ringing.

  “I was like, ‘No, no. I can barely hear you. I have to—we have to go.’

  “The next thing I distinctly remember is yelling. We just went right into the hospital. He was yelling, ‘We need to get through! We need to get through!’ There was no stopping in the waiting room or anything like that.

  “Then I remember sitting in this weird bed-chair thing and there was a nurse doing all the things with my pupils, like shining light in my eyes. The nurse was talking. I was really trying to understand him but I remember, it was so hard to stay conscious. It was so hard to hear and process what he was saying, and not black out. I was trying with every grain of my being not to. I just kept saying, ‘I feel so sick. I don’t know what’s wrong.’