I had been excited the first time I showed her my own hair instead of the blond wig that JT always wore. It was short all around, shorn bangs and a long piece on top, chunks carved out around the ears. It didn’t exactly look good; I thought it lengthened the extension to my weak chin, but it was an interesting haircut. That day at Asia’s grandparents’ house, I beseeched her to trim it, one of my many attempts to be alone with her. Her baby girl, Ana Lou, had also come on the trip. We had spent the afternoon in the sun on top of an arid hill making grass chains. We waited until Ana Lou went to sleep. As she cut my hair I realized it would only take a few minutes. We needed a longer diversion. Just as she finished, Ana Lou woke up. “It’s good enough?” she asked, rushing out the door. She was a mother first.
But now, as she clipped her arms under her head and stretched out on the down comforter at the Ritz, there was nothing to stop us. I lay down on the bed beside her, sideways, so close I could feel her heat. She leaned over and grated her teeth against my pale arm, then grabbed my hips and whispered huskily, “I wish I had a dick.” I took pause—what exactly did she mean? Was she wishing that she’d had a strap-on? Was it boring to have sex without one? The self-loathing side of my brain told me she just wasn’t into girls. In hindsight, I think she was trying to please JT, give him what she thought he wanted. But did she really think I was JT?
At this point the usual roles of who takes the lead and who waits had already been so skewed; things were awkward to start. In many ways I just wanted to get this first time out of the way because I felt so nervous and put on the spot. In the back of my mind I hoped she would invite me to stay with her in LA while she wrote the screenplay for the movie. I saw us having sex on different leather sofas: one cream, one brown, one executive black, disheveled party clothes in piles on the floor, half-full champagne glasses abandoned on the piano. She would dare me into a sexual realm that I couldn’t even imagine. I’d had dreams of grappling with her, of kissing and biting her from ear to armpit to toe. I wanted to take her hands—her beautiful hands—and hold them in my mouth slowly like a boa constrictor taking down its food, taking in each crux of that translucent skin between her fingers. I wanted to have sex outside, against walls, on rocks, in parks, in man-made lakes. I’d dreamed of entering her, but it wasn’t with a strap-on. In my fantasy, I felt her walls trembling, emanating heat. This abandon would take time for me to work out. I had to let my guard down, and feel comfortable with her.
From my bag, I nonchalantly retrieved a CD, pretending as if I’d just had it with me by chance. Inserting it in the disc player, I said, “You like this?” I couldn’t believe that I was living out one of the moments I had practiced so many times in my head.
One of my favorite albums, Sketches of Spain, began to play, the austere drum rolls building up into militaristic horns at sunrise. She walked over abruptly to the CD box and shut it off.
“I don’t like it.”
Embarrassed, I said quickly, “Uh, here, I got’ta another.”
The ebbing sitar and harp of Alice Coltrane’s Journey to Satchavanida recalled rain dripping off the eves, caught in a tropical storm. Did she like this? She nodded. I looked her in the eyes and one last time made a silent pact with myself to tell her the truth, but later. I would tell her the next time we saw each other.
We began kissing slowly. She said, “I’m so shy, JT. I’m not like you think.”
I put one hand on the drop of her back between her wings. There she was, just as I had always imagined her. I kissed her clavicle, marveling at the shimmering muscles of her breastplate.
We began slowly to grab, pull, and peel at each other. I slipped my hands around the roping muscles on her back, running my palms down over the dimple of her sacrum and locking my hands together. I wanted to hold onto her for as long as possible. Then she breathed heavily, her thick hair falling in her face. She whispered, “You’re beautiful, JT.” I shuddered as she said it. There we were, all possibility of disguise or impersonation finally dissolved. In our naked state, I had hoped we would reach a place of honesty and truth. But I felt caught, still wondering whom her words were meant for. I felt JT’s passivity—or was it my own?—closing in on me like a velvet curtain, the realization of my fantasies evaporating. There really was no experience—even this most intimate one—that guaranteed authenticity. If Asia knew deep down that there was no JT, she would tire of me quickly and move on to someone who wouldn’t be once removed, who wouldn’t be fake. If she didn’t realize what was going on—if she believed surgery had gotten this good—if she still thought I was a boy who became a girl, still pretending to be a boy—then I wasn’t registering at all with her. But that was what I had told her. Either way, I felt trapped.
The following morning, light seeped through cracks in the curtains. In the gloaming, the bed glowed white, shifting like a mirage. The hotel sheets had been tucked so tightly that there were no crooks in which to wrap my feet. Her tousled hair smelled like sweet almond oil, tobacco, and drugstore shampoo. Her face was buried in a pile of pillows and her elbows, tawny and wrinkled like an elephant’s skin, torqued out of the covers as if she were poised in a fall. I lifted my hand and pressed it to my mouth, feeling so disoriented that I couldn’t perceive the sheets beneath me, just a warm floating feeling.
LAURA
THE FIRST TIME I MET LAURA, I was home on winter break from boarding school. Geoff and she had already been together for a couple of years, but the family didn’t get together very often. On this occasion, however, the entire family had gathered for a nonconformist sort of Jewish Christmas dinner at Geoff’s mother’s house, a modest Victorian perched at the top of Noe Valley in San Francisco, which she and John had purchased in the mid ’60s.
A little family history: my father, John, married his high-school sweetheart, Judy, and had three children—Tanya, Michelle, and Geoff. Judy’s parents weren’t happy about my father being a gentile, so the two of them ran off to Spain. After their funds ran out—his college fund that he had decided to “self-educate” with—my father moved the family back to the States, eventually settling in San Francisco. When Geoff was two, John left Judy for my mother, Sharon, a painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Around this time John burned his own writings and began to film things with his sixteen millimeter camera. They went on long trips together to film dunes or hot air balloons. Eventually they moved into a loft south of Market Street. Sharon got pregnant with my sister Hennessey, then me, and John kept working on documentaries. My older sister and I were the children of this volatile union, which was effectively over by the time I was seven.
On the evening I first met Laura, Judy had made an elaborate feast. Not realizing that it was a sit-down affair, our half of the family was extremely late. In addition to her children, their significant others, and our father, Judy had invited Hennessey, her soon-to-be husband Richard, my mother, and me.
Sitting at the lace-clad table, I watched Laura, the latest inductee to our clan. She had a classical look, like a Dutch milkmaid in a Rembrandt painting—with full rosy cheeks accenting her pale skin, thin lips, and cherub’s curls peeking out from under her snug brown crocheted hat. She wore a low-cut flower print dress, and her skin was so translucent, I could make out a schema of veins on her chest beneath a row of thin chains.
I noticed that there was a determination in her eating. She shoved food in without seeming to taste it, as if she could have been stabbing her mouth with the fork without feeling it. She wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t thin, either. At this time, I was charitable in such matters. I had an eating disorder of my own and could recognize kin. I glanced over at Geoff, who sat next to her, munching on a bite of sweet potato. He must have been aware of her compulsions. Later I would see him take care of her, gently telling her she didn’t have to eat the whole box of chocolates, it would still be there later.
Geoff was a new-age rock-and-roll health nut, preoccupied with free radicals, exposure to the sun, and airborne germs. (He
and Laura shared an obsession about the toxicity of the planet.) Though we hadn’t spent much time together as kids, I’d gotten to know him better the previous summer. He’d taken a pizza-delivery gig near my mother’s house and would often come by to visit before a shift. He would pick up my guitar and strum away, filling the house with the latest song he’d written. He was passionate about music, and a talented guitar player. He’d wanted to be a musician since he was a child. He’d come of age in the ’70s and loved rock and punk, but now he was working on songs with catchy beats and lyrics, trying to write a hit. Geoff seemed filled with the optimism of someone who knows against all odds he is going to make it as an artist.
In those days, he always wore baggy (preferably organic) cotton pants and T-shirts. He spent a great deal of time in his community garden plot growing purple potatoes, fresh basil, and rosemary. In the summers, he picked wild blackberries, which he sold at Rainbow Foods, a co-operative health food store. He also supported his music career by selling Multi-Pure water filters. He generally sold them at swap-meets and by word-of-mouth. With an earnest expression, his eyebrows slightly raised, he would explain how the dense carbon filter on a Multi-Pure removed more lead, more arsenic, and more chlorine than any other filter on the market. He sold one to everybody in our family. One day, so the story went, he got a call from a sultry-voiced woman, who needed her water filter fixed. She’d looked him up in the yellow pages, and now she sat beside him at Judy’s table.
Laura told me that she knew Geoff was good-looking from that first phone conversation. He was tall, with wavy dark brown hair and almond-shaped brown eyes framed by a strong brow. His build was naturally muscular and lissome, and he had a loose, buoyant way of moving, as if his joints had coils in them. In the story of their first encounter, Laura confided that in order to keep her block up, she’d told Geoff she was in a relationship with a woman. While Geoff repaired Laura’s Multi-Pure—gently screwing back in the filter, checking to see if there was any sediment on the inside of the lid—they connected on the topic of music. They’d both grown up listening to the Dead Kennedys, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Bad Brains, and the Avengers. Their interests intersected so deeply that he asked her if she wanted to make music with him. In their first session they wrote two songs together.
Knowing Geoff, I can guess how he approached her—being very soft-spoken, he probably kept his head low and didn’t look her in the eye. His manner was always sweet and polite. Laura later explained to me, “I mean, I wasn’t huge, but Geoff was the type who was coupled up with the pretty girls. I remember that on our first date he put his head on my lap. Even though it was uncomfortable and I was sweating, I refused to move out of that position.” At that time Laura was working on her issues, walking her steps of food abstinence.
Judy had disliked Laura instantly. Though I never asked Judy what exactly rubbed her the wrong way, I could guess. Laura clamored for the entire room’s attention, whether she was at a meeting or at a dinner party. Part of Laura was always trying to convince everyone around her that she was a force of nature. She was talented, verbose, and smart. She didn’t care whom she offended in order to get her point across. She never let anyone ignore her, she wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she wouldn’t be quiet for the sake of fitting in.
Geoff and Laura had moved in together and started a band called Daddy Don’t Go. They supported the music with a phone sex business. Their songs were put on compilations for Internet sex sites, and Laura used her powers of persuasion to get them press in the Bay Guardian and other alternative papers. They marketed their music on the street as well. While Geoff waited in the car as the look-out, Laura would plaster freeway underpasses, construction walls, and every pole in sight with their band’s posters. Their shows sold out, but they never got signed to a record label. Almost immediately after hooking up with Geoff and starting the band, Laura fell off her abstinence from binging. She hated the pressure of being the lead singer of the band, and had told me once that her eating habits were a pendulum of fasting and binging.
In the candlelight, Laura’s fork glinted as she lifted it to her mouth over and over. A row of silver hoops cascaded down her ear. The rest of the clan seemed irritated from having to wait so long for us to show up. Pausing, Laura said to Hennessey, “You know, I just graduated from piercing school.”
“Really?” Hennessey seemed relieved to speak about something besides our tardiness.
“I pierced a tongue last week,” Laura said excitedly. “There’s no other solid muscle you can pierce like that on the rest of the body.”
I begged her, “Will you pierce my eyebrows?”
“Savannah!” my mother balked. I’d already pierced my belly button, which made her cry.
Hennessey tried to create a diversion and said, “So, what’s going on with the band?”
Geoff said, “Adam, our bass player, had a baby—it’s been hard to keep everyone together.”
Laura piped in, “But we did this Cyborgasm thing, and that was really cool.”
“Cyborgasm? What’s that?” Hennessey asked.
“It’s this compilation of erotic rock. We only have one song on it,” Geoff said quickly, trying not to meet eyes with his mother.
Laura added, “Yeah, it was cool to get a check from Warner Brothers, but they didn’t cut us a very good deal. I’m still doing phone sex, you know, for rent.”
Judy and Geoff’s sisters tensed up. The air was palpably thicker.
Richard, Hennessey’s soon-to-be husband, asked, “So tell us, Laura, what’s the wackiest caller you’ve ever had?” Richard was a lawyer and couldn’t help but be inquisitive.
Laura giggled a little coquettishly and said, “They’re all wacky. Lately, every one of them has been into butt plugs.”
“Butt plugs?” Sharon asked, genuinely perplexed. “What’s a butt plug?”
Laura said, “You know—it’s like a little Christmas tree you put up your butt.”
My father, John, leaned back, and rocked slightly on the hind legs of his chair. His cheeks were a little flushed from the wine, and you could tell he found Laura amusing—but he was also sizing her up in his quiet way.
Richard pressed, “There’s got to be one caller who stands out, Laura. Come on, tell us about the craziest caller you’ve ever had.”
Laura stopped eating and threw her round eyes up to the ceiling for a second.
Tanya and Michelle, Geoff’s older sisters, started to clear plates. Geoff, meanwhile, bent his head sheepishly and cut the remaining turkey on his plate into very small pieces.
“Well,” Laura began, “There’s my 10 p.m. He’s older and from the South, always wants black girls. His fantasy is to be barbecued alive and eaten by a couple of girls at a church social.” She transformed her voice, putting on a high-pitched Southern accent, “Now he’s on the spit and we sayin’, he’s stringy, he needs more barbecue sauce on him.” Laura’s phone sex name was Letisha. What she left out in deference to Geoff’s mother and sisters was that Geoff’s name was Kaisha—he played Letisha’s sister at the church social barbeque. Nevertheless, Judy stood up and went to tend to something in the kitchen. The rage in the back of her throat gurgled into an indignant snort. There was a part of Laura that enjoyed this. I know I did.
After the band fell apart, Laura started writing more seriously. She drafted a story from the perspective of a young teenage runaway, someone inherently sympathetic because of his age and that he survived—she called him Terminator. He was her alter ego who later became JT. Once Laura told me that when she was young she’d always wished she was a boy—a pretty, chosen boy. It just seemed as if boys slid through life easier. No one ever called her pet names. If they called her anything, they were names, like “Fat Albert” and “Witchy Poo,” or they were dirty names that made her want to walk faster. As a teenager she would call up hotlines in different voices, transposing her own stories into those of stray teens, mostly boys. Laura would write these stories on scraps of paper, in
the margins of newspapers, or on bits of napkins. JT’s pain seemed like a metaphor for her own.
Some time back, Laura found Dr. Terence Owens, a therapist who was head of the children’s ward at St. Mary’s hospital. From what I gather, he was responsive to JT. She called him every day in JT’s voice, describing accounts of JT’s life, his experiences of traveling around with his mother and living on the street. Dr. Owens told her she should write these accounts down, and offered JT a venue for his work: he would share JT’s writings with his social worker class. Laura was thrilled to finish a story and have an audience to read it to. She began staying up all night working on a single piece until it was done. She would ask Dr. Owens what his class thought of the story—did they like the writing, did they respond to those key moments? He could only give her clinical evaluations. She wanted more feedback. She began to seek out other writers she admired and speak to them over the phone as JT. A neighbor put her in contact with the poet Sharon Olds. When she realized she could contact the people who inspired her, she said that it was like calling up God on the phone. She got in contact with the writer Dennis Cooper and spoke to him regularly for several years. He gave JT encouragement, and connected him to the writer Bruce Benderson, who in turn helped to get JT published. At one point JT and Dennis mulled over the idea of planting rumors that Dennis had actually written the books because JT didn’t feel like he wanted to expose his identity. He wasn’t ready to put a face on the content of his books.
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