by Jane Leavy
At least Lisa was willing to see him again, to have lunch or a cup of coffee; an hour with her made him happy. Amy could tell when he had seen her. His voice brightened on the phone, and when he came over, his eyes glowed turquoise again. "Lisa told him she was glad all that silly stuff was over, that she was happy he was back," said Amy. "He nursed some kind of hope it would develop beyond that."
But as the months slid into fall, the light dimmed. There were crushing bills, and no more mentions of Lisa's laugh over an afternoon latte. When Amy asked him if he'd seen her lately, he just said, "She's moved on."
November 2009 was unusually chilly for L.A., a damp cold that rarely settled over the city. The night before Thanksgiving, Mike called Amy and asked if she had a gun. "You know I can't help you with that," she said. She drove to his apartment, but when she got there he wouldn't talk about it. She dragged him to Marie Callender's for some chili, but he just stared past the chintz curtains at the cars whipping by in the darkness.
Amy was going to the home of a colleague for Thanksgiving dinner, a woman who had urged her to bring Mike along. "If you don't want to come, at least sit in my apartment and wait for me there," Amy pleaded.
"I'm driving through the Jack in the Box, and I have some errands," he told her. "Don't worry about it."
The call came in at 8:15 P.M. on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. One of the neighbors and her boyfriend had spotted the Toyota as soon as they pulled into the parking structure below the stained stucco apartment building on Sepulveda. The motor was running, and a vacuum-cleaner hose snaked through the passenger-side window. A man was slumped against the seat. The boyfriend pulled him from the car, tried some CPR, and the girl dialed 911 on her cell phone.
By the time the EMS had taken Mike to the hospital in Culver City, the building manager had let two police officers into his apartment. At first, the 500-square-foot studio seemed like the typical lair of a transient single man: nothing on the walls, jeans draped over the generic pine furniture, the small fridge virtually empty. "Then I looked at the unopened mail," recalled Antonio Vasquez, one of the officers. "There was a lot of it, and most of it was addressed to a woman."
On the bed, in an envelope, was a handwritten note. For two decades, Mike Penner had crafted subtle sentences that teased the ironies out of the self-important world of sports; Christine Daniels, the woman he became for 18 months, added self-revelation and raw emotion to the mix. But in the end, there were only terse instructions. Call my brother, John. And Chris Foster, a close friend and colleague from the Los Angeles Times. And Lisa. Of course, Lisa. To her, "All my love."
Princess Di. Farrah. Cher. They are all here, or at least their wigs seem to be, at Christine's memorial service, on a Saturday afternoon in January at the Metropolitan Community Church. Some of the women sit together in the pews, reaching behind one another's broad backs to gently pat a shoulder; others come in alone, drawing fringed wraps or generously cut jackets around themselves to ward off the chill. By 5:00 P.M. the room is filled, both with full-timers and those who are living as men but have slipped away to pull on a dress and pumps to remember Christine.
There was a funeral in Long Beach a couple of days after Mike's death, a farewell to "Lisa and John's idea of who Mike was," said Scott French, who was asked to speak. "The story line was that he was depressed and had tried a lot of things and they didn't work." In the entryway there was a single image: a head shot of Mike, his mouth a closed-lipped smile. French and a few Los Angeles Times colleagues spoke about Mike's gentle impenetrability, his boundless love of soccer, the teammates who called him the Gaffer, British slang for "the boss." They praised his talent and mourned the sadness that dogged him. The only acknowledgment that their friend spent a year and a half as a woman was when Billy Witz got up to describe Christine's joy over the first goal by the shyest of the girls they had coached. The room was silent.
Amy was the only trans at the funeral, and she sat quietly in the back. John Penner had called to invite her; they had run into each other time after time at the hospital. Another transwoman, Michelle Evans, who had struck up a friendship with Christine through the blog, had shown up with her wife of 27 years, but Lisa had insisted that John turn them away at the door.
Six weeks later, at the Metropolitan Community Church memorial, an ebony-skinned transwoman in a black-and-yellow dress belts out "Walking Around Heaven All Day" like Cissy Houston. Amy LaCoe, nervous speaking in front of so many people, looks down at her notes and recalls that Christine was "as elegant in a pullover and jeans as she was in an evening gown." Susan Horn, a size 22 in a maroon silk sleeveless top, straps on a vintage Gibson ax and launches into "Travelin' Thru," from the soundtrack of Transamerica, which she and Christine often watched over trays of cocktail franks and glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. By the end of the song, the crowd is weeping. A photomontage flashes across the 50-inch screens that flank the stage. The music is Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime." Christine at an awards luncheon with a toothy smile. Christine at the microphone at a conference, her hand chopping the air. Christine in a soft blue sweater, her head thrown back with laughter.
And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God! What have I done?
Contributors' Notes
Notable Sports Writing of 2010
Contributors' Notes
CHRIS BALLARD is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He is the author of three books, including The Art ofa Beautiful Game, and is currently working on a book about the 1971 Macon Ironmen baseball team. A graduate of Pomona College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he has been at SI since 2000 and now lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two daughters. This is his second appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
JAKE BOGOCH, a freelance writer and former editor in chief of Skiing magazine, has lived and worked in five NHL cities. The latest is home to the Blackhawks.
YONI BRENNER writes for film and television. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and has also published short humor in the New York Times, The New Republic, and Smithsonian and on the sports website Dead-spin.com. He lives in Brooklyn and roots for the Buffalo Bills.
HOWARD BRYANT is the author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, which was a finalist for the Society for American Baseball Research's 2003 Seymour Medal; Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball; and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron. He is a sentor writer for ESPN.com and appears regularly on ESPN: The Sports Reporters, ESPN: First Take, and Outside the Lines. In 2010 he received the Online Journalism Award for Online Commentary.
STERRY BUTCHER is a reporter with the Big Bend Sentinel and Presidio International newspapers. She lives in Marfa, Texas, with her husband and son. "Gentling Cheatgrass" was her first story for Texas Monthly.
MEGAN CHUCHMAOH is a television producer in the ABC News Brian Ross Investigative Unit. "The Coach's Secret" segment and a follow-up series of 17 broadcast stories about sexual abuse by coaches affiliated with USA Swimming, the sport's national governing body, won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in broadcast journalism.
DAVID DOBBS has written features and essays for the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired, Nature, and Scientific American. He is currently writing a book that explores the notion that the genes and traits underlying some of our most grievous mood and behavior probl ems may also generate some of our greatest strengths, feats, and happiness. He is the author of three books about science, culture, and the environment, including the acclaimed Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. He blogs on these and other subjects at Neuron Culture, hosted at Wired Science. You can see more of hi
s work at http://daviddobbs.net.
JASON FAGONE is the author of Horsemen of the Esophagus, an account of his year as a beat reporter on the competitive eating circuit. His journalism has appeared in GQ, Esquire, Wired, the Atlantic, Slate, Philadelphia, The Penn Stater, and Deadspin.com. He lives in southeast Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about American inventors and super-efficient cars.
MICHAEL FARBER has been a senior writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994. He won two Canadian National Newspaper Awards for sports writing while at the Montreal Gazette and in 2003 received the Elmer Ferguson Award for distinguished hockey writing from the Hockey Hall of Fame. A native of New Jersey, Farber has lived in Montreal since 1979. He and his wife, Danielle Tetrault, have two children.
TOM FRIEND is a senior writer at ESPN.com and an on-air feature reporter for ESPN television. He has worked for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Kansas City Star and was a columnist in the early 1990s for the now-defunct National Sports Daily. He has co-authored two books: Educating Dexter, the autobiography of an illiterate football player, Dexter Manley; and Jack of All Trades, the autobiography of baseball crony Jack McKeon. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri. His recent print work has been cited by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and his television work earned a 2010 New York Festivals Award. He lives in southern California with his wife and two children.
NANCY HASS, a contributing editor at the Wall Street Journal Magazine, has written about culture and commerce for two decades. Her work is frequently seen in GQ; she has been on the staff of Conde Nast Portfolio, Talk, and Newsweek; and she spent a decade under contract as a featured writer at the New York Times. From 1998 to 2004 she was a member of the journalism faculty at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She lives in New York City with her daughter, Dahlia, and her husband, Bob Roe, a longtime editor at Sports Illustrated.
PATRICK HRUBY is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to ESPN. com. He previously wrote for the Washington Times, holds degrees from Georgetown and Northwestern, and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Saphira. This is his third appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
SALLY JENKINS is a sports columnist and feature writer at the Washington Post. She is the author of several books, most notably the bestseller It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, with cyclist Lance Armstrong, and The Real All-Americans. This is her third appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. His work has appeared in Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and the Oxford American and in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories. He is on the core faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars and is the director of creative writing at Harvard University. His website is www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.
CHRIS JONES is a writer at large for Esquire magazine and a contributor to Grantland.com. This is his third appearance in The Best American Sports Writing; he has also won two National Magazine Awards. More of Jones's work appears on his blog about writing and words, sonofboldventure.blogspot.com. He lives with his wife and two sons in a house that looks like the house from Scooby Doo in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada.
This is MARK KRAM JR.'s sixth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing. He has been a feature writer on the sports staff of the Philadelphia Daily News since 1987 and contributes an essay on American sports for the South African periodical Business Day Sports Monthly. He is currently at work on a book for St. Martin's Press on two brothers—after one brother was paralyzed by a football injury, the other became his caregiver, confidant, and conduit for his plea to end his life via an injection administered by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kram lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with his wife and is the father of two daughters.
JOHN MCPHEE began contributing to The New Yorker in 1963. He has taught writing at Princeton University since 1975 and was awarded Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Award for service to the nation in 1982. McPhee has published 28 books, among them Annals of the Former World, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Uncommon Carriers. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
P. J. O'ROURKE is a political reporter who lives in New Hampshire. Once every four years there's something political to report. This leaves him ample time for bird hunting. He is an avid, if involuntary, practitioner of catch-and-release grouse and woodcock shooting. He owns a splendid Brittany spaniel, Millie, which he attempted to train himself. She ate the TV room sofa. His most recent book is Holidays in Heck.
AVNI PATEL is a television producer in the ABC News Brian Ross Investigative Unit. "The Coach's Secret" segment and a follow-up series of 17 broadcast stories about sexual abuse by coaches affiliated with USA Swimming, the sport's national governing body, won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in broadcast journalism.
MARK PEARSON attended the University of Michigan on a wrestling scholarship and then returned to his home state of Pennsylvania, where he worked as a journalist and pursued his interest in fiction. He earned a PhD in English from the University of Georgia; he also has an MA in English and creative writing from the University of California, Davis. His fiction has appeared in Aethlon, Blueline, Broken Bridge Review, Carve, Gray's Sporting Journal, Short Story, and Stories. He lives in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two daughters.
BILL PLASCHKE joined the Los Angeles Times in 1987 and has been a sports columnist since 1996. Plaschke is also a regular panelist on the ESPN daily talk show Around the Horn, and he made his film debut with three lines in the Will Smith movie Ali, playing a sportswriter. Plaschke was recently named Man of the Year by the Los Angeles chapter of Big Brothers/Big Sisters for his longtime involvement as a Big Brother. He has also received a Pursuit of Justice Award from the California Women's Law Center for his coverage of women's sports. This is his seventh appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
JOHN POWERS has worked for the Boston Globe since 1973, writing for the sports, metro, Sunday, magazine, and living departments. He shared the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a special Globe magazine report on the nuclear arms race. As part of his international sports beat, he has covered the Olympic Games since 1976 as well as seven men's and women's soccer World Cups and has written stories from five continents. Powers is the author of The Short Season, One Goal (with Art Kaminsky), Yankees (with George Sullivan), Mary Lou (with Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton), Seasons to Remember (with Curt Gowdy), The Boston Dictionary, and The Boston Handbook. Powers, a 1970 cum laude graduate of Harvard and a former Poynter Fellow at Yale, lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
S. L. PRICE has been a senior writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994. This is his sixth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
SELENA ROBERTS is a sentor writer for Sports Illustrated, where she has written the "Point After" column, investigative pieces, and features. She joined the magazine in January 2008 after spending 12 years covering pro teams and the Olympics and writing the "Sports of the Times" column for the New York Times. A graduate of Auburn University, Roberts began her sports writing career at the Huntsville Times in 1988 and then moved on to the Tampa Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She has written two books, Necessary Spectacle: Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, and the Tennis Match That Leveled the Game and A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez.
ROBERT SANCHEZ is the senior staff writer at 5280 magazine in Denver, writing mostly long-form features and narrative stories. This is his second appearance in The Best American Sports Writing. A former reporter for the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Associated Press, Sanchez has won or been nominated for multiple state and national awards, including the City and Regional Magazine Association's Writer of the Year, and he has twice been a finalist for the L
ivingston Award for Young Journalists. He graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is married to his high school sweetheart, Kristen. The two have a daughter, Alexandra, and a son, Michael.
BILL SHAIKIN is the national baseball writer for the Los Angeles Times. He has worked at the Times since 1997 and previously covered baseball for the Riverside Press-Enterprise and the Orange County Register. He also teaches sports reporting at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and is the author of Sport and Politics: The Olympics and the Los Angeles Games. Shaikin graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and he hopes to see Cal play in the Rose Bowl just once during his lifetime.