by Aimee Norin
The broad, open, empty, naked desert drew Oceanna like it never had before. Simi continued to lead the way a good fifteen lengths ahead of Oceanna, and every time she checked her mirrors, Mason was still taking up the rear. She thought to ask Mason why he wanted to come, but rethought it. She didn’t want to jinx it.
Barstow, at a gas station by the freeway, the three of them had fueled and were standing by their bikes, snacking on packaged sandwiches they got from the refrigerator inside.
“God knows why you can’t get sandwiches like this in the movie theatres,” Oceanna said. “All they sell there is sugar, salt, and saturated fat.”
Mason laughed. “Don’t I know it.”
Simi reached up and hugged both Oceanna and Mason, again, which brought smiles.
“What brought that on?” Oceanna asked.
Simi’s eyes watered. She didn’t say a word but shook her head no, went back to her sandwich.
Oceanna looked at Mason, who slightly nodded his head.
Simi lead the way as always, west on I-15 about a mile, then right on Highway 58.
“Oh my God, we’re going to die,” Oceanna said into her mike. She looked at the single-lane they were on out in the middle of nowhere.
“Better not!” Mason said back to her. “I don’t even have this new bike broken in yet.”
“I don’t even think there are rattle snakes out here,” she said.
“Sure there are. They eat the scorpions.”
“Scorpions!”
“Usually the scorpions win, though,” Mason teased. “Even if the snake kills them before eating them? If the stinger goes in backward, the snake will die. If they sting your tire, you’ll get a flat, and this ain’t the place for that, so watch out for ‘em.”
Oceanna jerked her head around to stare at Mason, who clearly laughed, bowing his helmet/head, and slapping himself on the face plate, waving at her a little.
Bakersfield: gas, bathroom, lunch again by the bikes.
Oceanna lay on the ground near her bike. “You two are young and fit. But I’m a little past my prime. You’re killing me.”
“Nonsense! You’re getting fit.” Mason said. “You’ll be fine. You’ve got a backrest on that thing. I know, ‘cause I put it there. And I don’t even have one on mine, yet. No mods at all—‘cause I just got it.”
“Serves you right.”
A man walked from the pump toward the store, scowling at Oceanna on the ground by her bike.
“Tolerant place, this Bakersfield,” Mason said.
Oceanna got up and dusted herself off. “Yeah. Time to go, chickadees.”
After Bakersfield, the ride north up I-5 was green with crops, farms and small towns.
“This is California’s Bible Belt,” Oceanna told Mason. “H.G. Wells zipped through here on his time machine one time? Got lost? And slipped part of this place about fifty years into the past.”
“Seems real nice, to me,” Mason said. “As far as it goes in a lot of ways. But I can see how it could be a problem.”
Up by the Bay, the 5 split off into the 580, and farm fields became solid city. In Oakland, the 580 became the 80, which took them over the bay into San Francisco.
Simi had been picking up speed as they approached, when she needed to be slowing down.
With some effort, Oceanna got in front of her and waved her hand sharply up and down, the sign for “slow down.”
Simi did, Oceanna fell back behind her.
Then Mason came around the front of both of them, patting his head with one hand, meaning “follow me.” He had in-panel G.P.S. on his 2014, to show them the way to the hotel.
CHAPTER
7
The parking lot attendant at the Marriott showed their bikes to parking, an informal area in their porte-cochére, across the driveway from the door to the hotel.
There were already two other bikes there, for the Pride parade, apparently. The temperature was very pleasant, very little breeze.
Oceanna groaned as she got off her bike. “Oh my God. Somebody please help bend my legs.” She stiffened her left leg and stood on it, slowly pulled her right leg off the seat to join her left on the concrete. “You have got to be kidding me.” She rubbed her butt and legs.
Mason and Simi both hopped off their bikes without much difficulty.
“You’re both young, you know. You put another forty years on your ass, and see if you respond as well.”
Simi untied her bag from her back seat and fastened the covers on her leather saddlebags. Oceanna and Mason got their luggage out of their fiberglass saddlebags, and they all went inside.
“Nice room,” Mason said. “Thank you.”
“Thank you for letting me pay,” Oceanna said to them both. “I wanted some place nice, and for what it’s worth, I may do some more of this before we’re done.”
The room was a suite, with a bed in one room, large bathroom, and a separate living room, plush with every kind of furnishing. The room overlooked Market St., the site of the Parade on Sunday.
“I’ll take the couch,” Mason said. He plopped his one bag on it and walked toward the bathroom.
Oceanna thought about it for just one second before agreeing: “Okay. Simi and I on the bed in there, I guess. Bathroom—catch as catch can.”
Simi was looking out the window at the parade route. She drew a see-through curtain to the side for a better view. “It’s amazing,” she said, with a smile to Oceanna. “We’re here.”
Four o’clock in the afternoon, the sun at mid-afternoon, the three of them stood together on Baker Beach, south of the Presidio’s western edge, and looked at the Pacific Ocean.
Simi walked out ahead of them to stand ankle deep in the swells that washed up on shore. She reached down to touch the water, and tears began to flow yet again.
Oceanna watched from fifteen feet behind and teared along with her.
“Am I missing something, Osh?” Mason asked her.
Oceanna nodded, wiping her eyes. “Yeah. I guess so. But it’s not my place to say. There’s been a lot that’s happened with her for quite a while.”
“Anything I could help with?”
“You already are, Mason. You’ve got to know that.” Oceanna gave him a little hug. “You are a miracle, and you don’t even know it.”
They watched Simi feel the water and then stand in the surf for the longest time.
The three of them rode their Harleys north across the Golden Gate Bridge, two hundred twenty feet above the water with a stunning view of the Bay, Alcatraz, Marin County, and San Francisco.
Vista Point was a popular viewing site just north of the Bridge. The three of them stood together, side by side, on top of the stone wall and looked at the area. They could see—everything: Coit Tower in San Francisco, Pier 39, Oakland Bay Bridge, boats making their way around the Bay—
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Simi said. She shed more tears.
Simi reached out to hold Oceanna’s hand on her left and Mason’s on her right.
Simi’s tears continued as she stared.
“Simi,” Mason asked. “You seem so happy, but also so sad. What’s the matter?”
Simi lowered her head, let go their hands and walked away to the north.
“Osh, what is it?” Mason asked.
Oceanna thought about it, and while she respected Simi’s privacy, she also felt Mason deserved her trust.
“I don’t know, exactly, Mason. I never knew her before. Just on the internet.”
“Okay.”
“But— Well, you know she’s—?”
Mason considered his words. “She’s a little like you?”
Oceanna nodded. “Yeah, but she’s transsexual. You could tell?”
“Yeah. I could tell something. Not sure what. Not my business to ask.”
“But there’s more to her than that.” Oceanna told Mason about her job in the Army, her torture, how she was starved and resigned herself to death, but then how sh
e ran through transition after she got out.
“I think she lied and forged everything to rush it through. She was busting. It was her captivity, but also, her life is different from mine,” Oceanna said, moving back to sit on her bike as she talked to him.
Mason did the same.
Simi stood by the wall on the eastern edge of Vista Point and looked to Marin County, to the north.
“She had a deep need from early childhood to be a girl, but she ate that and tried to tough it out as a man. A lot of them do. But in Afghanistan, she went through all that hell, and it snapped in her. Why she’s still alive today, I don’t know. It’s a miracle. How anybody could endure all that—” Oceanna said. “She suffered, so much. You don’t know. You have no idea. I have no idea.”
“You didn’t suffer?”
“Yeah, but not like that. No prisoner of war on top of her other huge weight. With me, I just grew into it. Like, I was forty before I ever even felt the need. And it was the mid ‘90s, and I worked in Hollywood on film sets, so I just did it. A friend, Regina, helped me. Nobody cared— Well, my mom cared, and a few others, but not most people. Some people liked it. But Simi— Totally horrific life, until now. Imagine being a little kid trying to deal with a need for this—not just socially, but feeling wrong with your own body at the same time. I swear— I’m not a brain scientist, but it seems there’s something organic, there, something in the brain that didn’t differentiate with her body to the male, when she was a fetus, something in the brain that was always really female, that hurt because it was out of sync with the rest of her body.
“She’s crying now out of joy, not misery, a regular water works. And she’ll probably cry gallons before she gets done. You know her transition was only this last few months?”
Mason looked surprised. “Really?”
Oceanna nodded.
“Six months ago she was in the Army, recovering in the hospital. Two months ago, she had G.R.S., her surgery down here. Genital reconstructive surgery.” She indicated her groin.
Mason’s eyes widened. “It’s hard to believe she was ever male.
“And she can’t be over the torture, yet. Or her life before. She was starving to death, before, inside. Then she was starved near to death in body. And now she’s at a banquet with the riches of the world spread out before her. If she doesn’t eat ‘till she explodes, I’ll be surprised. Need to slow her down some.
“More than that, now, she’s at a banquet that will be there even if she’s ever hungry again. She switched, and even if she tried hard, there wouldn’t be much going back. She’s female, now, and once changed, some things could never change back, even if she tried. Which I can tell, she won’t.”
“Do some?”
“Not usually. It’s not like deciding to live in Washington, or something. You don’t just change your mind. It’s a person learning who they are, inside. Who they need to be, and standing up to family, ‘priends,’ even her own self to be who they are. It’s not easy for anybody. Not anybody. You have to know that.
“And people who think we’re crazy?” Oceanna said. “Mentally ill? I can’t believe they actually have a diagnosis for us in the psychiatrist’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the D.S.M. The same one, too, for both of us, even though we’re really different. The A.P.A. are Neanderthals! It’s an ‘Axis One diagnosis,’ I think it is, if we’re ‘dysphoric’ about a gender issue. It’s the dark ages for us, still. Gays got out of there, but there’s a lot of money to be made off us. Transitions are expensive. They use the diagnosis for billings, and we get labeled as mentally ill. It all comes down to money. It’s a scam.”
“You’re— You’re not making this up,” Mason said.
“I wish I were. So you have to go to a doctor claiming you’re happy, to avoid the mentally ill stigma. It’s insane, and it’s them, not us. And people in general just go ahead and make life harder for us with other things in life without the slightest concern for their cruelty, never criticizing themselves for their actions, hurting people who already have too much on their plate, glad when we stop coming around.”
Mason looked at Simi in the distance, then at his feet, shaking his head.
“It’s like the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot back at Turk and Taylor, in Frisco—right over there—” Oceanna pointed, “not four blocks from our hotel. Back in ’66 or so. I don’t have the details, but I think it was illegal, back then, for males to wear women’s clothes? Ought to be a crime against that, right? God forbid! And the cafeteria became popular with people who did it anyway. Crossdressers—transvestites, they called it at the time—and transgenderists, as we called ourselves back then.”
“But you say you’re ‘transgender’ now?” Mason asked.
“Yeah, for some reason they dropped the ‘ist,’ but why I never understood. It only means ‘the person who.’ And we are the people who change gender, so go figure. Maybe it was politics with Charles Virginia Prince, Ph.D., who had popularized the term ‘transgenderist,’ because living as a woman with a penis isn’t as acceptable with the public—as far as that goes. So now they want to use the term ‘transgender’ for everyone, rolling transsexuals in as well, for more strength in numbers, but there are a lot of transsexuals who don’t like that—”
“Why?” Mason asked.
“Because they say they need to change biological sex, and that we want to move to a place on a continuum where we feel more comfortable, with traits of both. Like me.” Oceanna indicated her chest and her groin. “Breasts, but also penis.”
“Why don’t you want to be female down there, too?”
“What?! Why should I have to? I can be a woman in society with it. And I feel the need for it in bed. How would you like to have yours removed?”
“Sorry.”
“But I assume her sexuality is female,” Oceanna said, referring to Simi, “so she needed female-type genitalia to express that.”
Oceanna took a minute to absorb what she’d said. “So when we transgenders talk, we usually use the term ‘transgender’ and toss in a ‘transsexual’ term now and then to sort-of imply their identity as well, which some of them get mad about also because they say it makes it look to others like they are a subset of us, and they’re not.”
Oceanna turned to face Mason more. “Oh, did I catch hell from one transsexual, once. ‘The Big Bang Theory’—great T.V. show otherwise—had a gorgeous character on an episode who referred to herself as a ‘post-op transgender.’ I saw it and thought ‘Oh hell.’ And the transsexual blasted me for it, as if it was my fault, saying the T.V. show gave into the transgender paradigm, and transsexuals by effort are in the closet most of the time, so they can’t stand up for themselves without blowing their female lifestyle. She said the show and we—transgenders—oppress transsexuals by wrapping them into transgenderism. ‘All Asians are not Chinese,’ she said.
“If I called Simi ‘transgender,’ I don’t think she’d be here. I really think she’d leave in a heartbeat. Maybe after a fight.”
“She wouldn’t be your friend over that?”
Oceanna shook her head. “It’s hard to be someone’s friend, when they hurt you. And being the other sex is everything to them, to people like Simi, who were born with it.”
“So these different folks don’t all get along?” Mason asked.
“No. They don’t. Not usually. Transpersons—a better umbrella term, because all Asians are Asian—boy did I learn that—want to be with society as a whole, but society doesn’t usually want to be with them. Usually transgenders want to be with transsexuals, but not the other way around. C.D.s want to be with trans anything, but not the other way around, so much. Usually trans-most-anythings except closeted transsexuals want to be with gays, but not much the other way around. Drag Queen shows notwithstanding.”
“Drag Queens—”
“That’s an act on stage, a put-on: usually a sassy bitch in drag who entertains for fun and profit, makes people
smile, sings, tells jokes, teases the audience.” Oceanna continued. “And male-to-females want to be with female-to-males, but much less so the other way around—
“Mason, we have got to get over that crap and learn to be ourselves while we accept other people who are being themselves, too— And then there’s the problem of ‘stealth’ transsexuals who die to live in the closet, so they run away from other transpersons for fear they’ll be ‘read by association.’ Which, worse than that, other transpersons actually do like to out transsexuals against their will to associate themselves with them and maybe better their own social lot, as if it would help anyway—”
“What a tangled mess,” Mason said.
“Yeah! And then we complain that muggles don’t accept us? Hell, we don’t accept each other! It’s pitiful!”
Oceanna broke into a spur-of-the-moment tune: “We should know better, we should know better.
“But anyway,” Oceanna said, “That’s the way it is. To get back to topic a little bit? So, here, back in the ‘60s, transpeople weren’t welcome at gay bars, like most everywhere, so they happened to go there to the cafeteria.”
Oceanna pointed across the bay, and Mason looked, as if he could see the actual cafeteria.
“There was tension, and the place called the police. And there was abuse, police brutality—a riot, you know? It was kind of small, as riots can go, but it was major in the trans community, because they stood up to brutality and said they wouldn’t take it any more. I also think that kind of thing helped make San Francisco what it is, today.”
Mason looked to Simi on the eastern wall.
Oceanna teared.
Mason nodded his head yes.
“Nuala was one of the best people you could know,” Oceanna said. “She only wanted love and to make people happy.” Oceanna teared.
Simi came back to stand by Oceanna and slipped her arm around Oceanna’s shoulders.
Mason looked sorrowfully at them.
“What brought all that on?” Simi asked.