by Rufi Thorpe
“He didn’t die or anything, he just had to get stitches, but she got three years for it.”
“So that’s when you moved in with your aunt.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, unable to look at her, certain that now she would think differently of me.
“It’s such a shame we didn’t become friends earlier,” she said, grabbing my hand. “All this time, we could have been friends. Doesn’t that just seem so sad?”
But I was glowing, electric, so happy I could not even feel regret for those lost years. I had made my first friend in North Shore. My first best friend in my entire life really. And we were walking by the sea, a little lost and holding hands.
I had first begun finding men to meet on Craigslist when I was thirteen. I had not intended to reply to any of the ads, I was just window-shopping. While we had grown up poor, in many ways I had been sheltered, and I did not feel myself to be street-smart enough to handle myself well in such an encounter. But I did want, desperately, to find out if there were other gay men in my town and what they did and what they wanted and how they acted and the kinds of things they said to one another, and the easiest way for me to do that was by looking at the M4M postings on Craigslist. Our town was listed under the greater South Bay area, but there were a surprising number of salacious invitations within a fifteen-mile radius. The ads there were mostly terrifying to me, but I read them with absolute fascination, frantically decoding acronyms and learning lingo that seemed to me an indispensable code for gaining access to the world I would one day need to inhabit.
There was one other boy at my school who I could tell was also gay, but he was a quiet and obviously feminine sort, and I dreaded the episodes of Glee he would presumably insist we watch, as we drank, I imagined, Capri Suns purchased by his accepting mother.
During those late elementary, early middle school years, I was in crisis. I knew that I was gay, but I did not want to be gay-gay. I did not want other people to know, but I also had a culturally acquired prejudice against queen-y mannerisms for their own sake. That was a popular take when I was growing up, among the post–Will & Grace generation: Fine, do what you want in bed, but do you have to talk in an annoying voice? I did not want to be annoying, I did not want to be wrong, I wanted to be right. And yet I knew that something about the way my hands moved betrayed me, the way I walked, my vocabulary, my voice. I did not consciously choose my eyeliner and septum piercing and long hair as a disguise, but in retrospect that is exactly what they were. I knew I could not pass as straight, but I thought perhaps I could pass as “just weird.” No, I wanted nothing to do with that fey boy who accepted himself, and it pains me now to wonder how my life would have gone had I been psychologically sound enough to have made friends with him and begun so much earlier the hard work of attempting to love myself. I probably would have really loved Glee.
The first ad I ever responded to on Craigslist was from a “20yo Shy Boi” who said he had never been kissed, and wanted his first kiss to be on the pier at Redondo Beach. The ad was sweet and stammering, and before I could reconsider, I hurriedly wrote back that I also had never been kissed and would love to share his first kiss with him on the pier.
We set a date and time, and I took the bus down to Redondo Beach, a halting, galloping ride down Sepulveda that took nearly an hour and a half, though the actual mileage was scant, and I made my way out onto the pier, a massive U-shaped expanse, where seafood restaurants served slabs of grilled fish on sheets of newspaper and gelato shops spilled neon light, and I waited and waited, until finally a fat ginger-haired boy came up to me. I could see at once why no one had kissed him: His skin (pale), his lips (chapped), his hair (bowl), his shirt (Super Mario Bros.), all were nerd. Even the air around him seemed to nerd. I did not find him attractive, but I could in no way stomach the thought of turning him down now, so brutally, in such a carnival atmosphere, not to mention the wasted bus fare, and so we stood together for a long time by the sea, not saying much except that we were both nervous and that I was younger than he thought I’d be, and then he lunged at me.
The kiss was wet and squirmy and terrible, but it was over soon enough, and we did not repeat it, though we did sit on a bench side by side, I think both of us scanning our surroundings to reassure ourselves that skinheads were not going to rush out of the arcade and push us into the sea for being homos. When we finally parted after some truly painful conversation about the video game Halo 3, we hugged, though the term “hug” does nothing to evoke the awkward frozen grip we used, unable to relax, unable to let go, both of us shuddering every time we breathed in or out. When this intimacy became unbearable, it became so in unison, and in magical concord we released our grip, thanked each other, and departed, going opposite ways on the U-shaped pier. We never spoke to each other again.
It was then that I understood that these encounters were fundamentally about loneliness, flashes of intense intimacy so awkward and fragile that they had no place in real life. The men I met online were not secret initiates into a world I could take part in, but refugees from the world I already knew too well.
I did not initially tell Bunny about these encounters, even as they became ongoing and dominated more and more of my mental field of play. In part, she seemed to me to be from another world where such things simply didn’t happen. But I also had a sense that I could continue with my actions only if they were entirely unexamined, and I needed desperately for them to continue, even if my interactions with these men were unfulfilling and bizarre. I once had sex with a man in a Starbucks bathroom at ten o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday. I can still remember vividly the electric thrill of going to algebra afterward.
I spent a great deal of time in the apartment of a man named Ed, who was Chinese and tall and worked in finance, whatever that meant. What indefinable loveliness, to feel the mountain of him shaking beneath me. To learn his smells, the vaguely sour yeast of his balls, the sweet and dark smell of his bum. It did not matter to me at all that though he was in his forties, he seemed to have the emotional maturity and insight of a teen girl, and not even a real teen girl, but the stereotype of a teen girl. Sometimes he would say shyly, “I think you’re really cool.” He was insecure about the size of his cock. “Everything else about me is big,” he said in a gloomy Eeyore voice, clearly expecting to be told that no, his penis was fine, was average. “I’ll have to punish you for having such a puny cock, then,” I said. And I made him lie down across a big black leather chair in his living room, and I spanked him with a whisk I found in the kitchen.
How could I tell Bunny I did these things? I could scarcely admit to myself they were happening. Where had the impulse in me to hurt Ed come from? Why had I enjoyed it so much, making his muscular little ass red and welted? Was it related to watching the way my father had once spanked my sister with a hairbrush? What was wrong with me? It was much better not to investigate it at all.
In every other sense, my relationship with Bunny became one of intimate confidences, though we avoided each other at school, where she belonged to a flock of similarly sporty girls who carried great duffel bags of kneepads hither and thither, and where I belonged, however peripherally, to a group I had privately begun to think of as the “Revolting Youth” (do you like the pun?) that included goth girls and stoners and metalheads and also some guys who just really enjoyed Magic: The Gathering. But in the evenings, or on the rare afternoon she didn’t have practice, Bunny and I convened in her empty house to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race—which, to my surprise, Bunny had loved even before I met her.
Drag queens for me glittered the same way all queer cultural artifacts did, with an intoxicating, radiant, ultraviolet dust that indicated they were secretly for me. For Bunny, I think the allure may have been the deconstruction of the artifice that is cultural femininity. As often as I was failing to pass as a straight boy during those years, Bunny was failing to pass as a girl. She was built like a bull, and she was
confident and happy, and people found this combination of qualities displeasing in a young woman. She had no mother or sister to teach her how to do her hair, or how to dress, or how to do her lipstick, what was “too much” and what was “just right,” and so she felt like a clown attempting any of it.
I became her confidant as she explored the girliness she had been too shy to explore on her own: face masks and what to do about her cuticles and how to pluck eyebrows. And she became the one person in my real life, my regular life, my non-Craigslist life, around whom I could practice being gay. RuPaul’s Drag Race was oddly central to all of this, and we culturally appropriated the shit out of those drag queens. Every catchphrase, every piece of slang, we immediately fell in love with and began using as our own, not with other people, but only between ourselves. It was like a secret code that expressed everything: who we were, and who we wanted to be.
After watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, we would usually go for a swim in her pool. Bunny was a terrific swimmer, and she liked to roughhouse in the water, which scared me, and several times she almost drowned me. She liked to lull me into a false security by claiming she was going to swim some laps, and then, when I was floating peacefully on my back, she’d suddenly surface directly under me and grab me by the middle and drag me down and roll me around like she was an alligator. Every single time she did it, I swore I would refuse to swim with her ever again, and every single time she promised she would never do it again, and then of course she would.
At first I wondered if Bunny was gay, given the obsessive cutting out and arranging of images of female athletes into collages and scrapbooks, as well as her general size and disposition, but her heterosexuality was so fervent and tender that it caused her much pain. When would she get a boyfriend, would she ever get a boyfriend, what was wrong with her that no one wanted to be her boyfriend? Once she asked me to look at her naked and tell her what I thought.
I had just finished plucking her eyebrows and her entire forehead had turned bright red, the blood rushing to the surface at having been so assaulted.
“I don’t need to see you naked,” I told her. “You’re a sixteen-year-old athlete. Your body is unfathomably perfect. There is nothing that seeing it naked could tell me that I can’t see when you’re in a bathing suit.” (This was a weensy lie: There was something overdeveloped about her abs that made her look like a Ninja Turtle, in my opinion.)
“I think my nipples are weird,” she said. “I think the areolas are too big and, like, pale.”
“Your areolas are fine,” I said.
“You haven’t seen them.”
“Even if your areolas were purple and covered with hair, boys would still want to suck on them,” I said, and I considered it to be true.
“Do you watch porn?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. “Do you?”
She nodded. This surprised me.
“Well, at first it was scary,” she admitted. “But then I figured out how to really only see the kinds of things I liked.”
“What do you like?” I asked, even though I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. That was a character trait of mine, the kind of curiosity that killed so many cats. I was always sniffing rotten food in the refrigerator too.
“Bigger girls,” she said, unable to look at me. She squinted her eyes shut and forced herself to go on. “Girls who look more like me. Just having, like, normal sex. That isn’t, well, mean. With, like, gagging or choking or hitting. I don’t like that stuff.”
Oh, Bunny, I thought, of course you don’t. And I pictured her, alone at her computer, so desperate to understand sex, so desperate to have it, to touch and be touched, and then to stumble across videos like that, where women’s heads are hoisted by their ponytails in blow jobs so violent they gag and throw up. Or who were throttled, their faces turning red and ugly, or who were spit on, or who were slapped. And brave, quizzical Bunny, wondering: Will I have to do that? Is that what I am supposed to do? To be?
I was jealous, too, that there was something so healthy in her, so vital and pure, that she saw those images and knew not to like them. I had been stunned, but not surprised, by the first man who hurt me while we were having sex, and I learned quickly to hurt others. Ever since, against my will, images of a more sadistic nature had been appealing to me, and sometimes I could click and click and click until I was watching things that gave me nightmares afterward.
And so I told her what maybe I should not have told her, which is that it would be older men who wanted her, men who were more confident, less cowed by her physical strength and size. That to a man even in his twenties, her youth itself would be enough to flood his mouth with saliva.
“Like how old?” she asked excitedly.
“No,” I said, “this is not an endorsement of you trying to find perverts to fuck you.”
“But like how old?”
“When you’re in college,” I said. “Boys then won’t be so scared. Someone will be lucky to date you.”
“Do you think a college guy would date me now?” she asked.
“Bunny, you could be a fucking camgirl if you wanted, it’s not about that, it’s about finding someone to have a real relationship with. Who will value you. Who will understand how insanely incredible you are.”
She let it drop, but I knew she wasn’t satisfied.
* * *
—
One of the terms we stole from RuPaul’s Drag Race was the concept of “realness.” They would say, “Carmen is serving some working girl realness right now,” and a lot of the time it just meant passing, that you were passing for the real thing, or that’s maybe what the word began as. But there were all different kinds of realness. In Paris Is Burning, which we must have watched a hundred times, a documentary about New York City drag ball culture, there were drag competitions with categories like Businessman or Soldier. Realness wasn’t just about passing as a woman, it was about passing as a man, passing as a suburban mom, passing as a queen, passing as a whore. It was about being able to put your finger on all the tiny details that added up to an accurate impression, but it was also about finding within yourself the essence of that thing. It was about finding your inner woman and letting her vibrate through you. It was about finding a deeper authenticity through artifice, and in that sense it was paradoxical and therefore intoxicating to me. To tell the truth by lying. That was at the heart of realness, at least to me.
I made Bunny play realness games with me all the time. I tried on her clothes. She tried on mine. We wore the same size shoes, as it happened. We practiced walking like boys, we practiced walking like girls. We did impressions of specific people. I was particularly good at imitating Ann Marie, a girl on Bunny’s volleyball team, but I could also do a convincing Principal Cardenas.
The thing about these games is that Bunny was absurdly bad at them. She couldn’t do it. She always seemed like a child overacting. When she tried to act feminine, she careened into strange Blanche DuBois territory. When she tried to act masculine it was all mid-’90s LL Cool J lip-licking weirdness. All her accents quickly devolved into Australian. And the thing about these games was that I was great at them in a way that scared us even as it made us laugh.
“Do my dad,” she said one day, “ooh, do my dad!”
I turned to her, finding almost immediately the way Ray held his mouth, the lips a little pooched, the way he raised one eyebrow higher than the other, the way his cheeks were a little flabby so they made his consonants too plosive, his vowels a bit sticky. “Bunny Rabbit,” I said, and I was prepared to go on, to say something like “And I’m not a racist, I love black people, but—”
Bunny screamed and leapt up to stand on top of the bed and began bouncing. “That was too good, that was too weird, oh my god, that was so weird.”
I laughed and said, “Really?”
“No, it was scary good.”
> I tried to stop smiling, closed my eyes, and found him again in my mind. “Bunny, goddamnit, Coach Creely called because you’re failing trig, is that true?”
Bunny was jumping on the bed, squealing, “Oh my god! Oh my god, put on his clothes!”
“What? No,” I said, though I was fascinated by the idea, and it was not long before we had entered her father’s bedroom and dressed me in one of his shirts, unbuttoned too far, and with a small pillow from the couch as a paunch. I put on one of his ratty baseball caps, and we drew purple bags under my eyes with a plum lipstick Bunny had bought but never been able to pull off. We examined me in the mirror of the black Madame Butterfly death-suite bathroom.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “Now the hands.”
“What, this?” I asked, as I crossed my arms up high over my fake belly so that it looked like I was fondling my own armpits.
“Oh my god,” Bunny said. “Oh fuck. How do you do that?”
“Do what?” I asked, and then I did his laugh and she screamed.
I lost it and we both laughed with our real voices as we watched ourselves in the bathroom mirror. Who were we? I wondered.
Who was anyone?
* * *
—
I often wondered who Bunny would be without volleyball, it so dominated every aspect of her life. And while the dream had been set for her by her father—Ray who had seen her height and her strength and decreed her a star, Ray who plotted her course to Olympic fame (it was always, always assumed by her father that the Olympics were the goal)—volleyball was also something Bunny genuinely loved. She had done basketball too, when she was younger, and she had liked it, but the decision to focus on volleyball had in large part come from her, even if her attachment to her female coach seemed to me obviously psychologically unhealthy.
Coach Creely was cold and mean, her approval hard to get and stingy when it came, and to watch Bunny slave and slaver, seeking comfort and love from this false mother figure, was at times a bit much for me. Overall, the psychodynamics of the entire situation were undesirable, and yet the game itself was the one good thing in Bunny’s life. She was happiest on the court, where all her instincts were the right instincts, where she didn’t have to second-guess anything, where she and her body were fused and single. She was, quite literally, an animal on the court, and I sometimes marveled at the easy violence of her playing.