Piranha opens the door after one knock. She’s wearing a long Indian-looking skirt and a baggy brown jacket, both of which hide her figure. She gives Piranha a hug and she says, I’m so sorry, babe.
Maria says, Yeah, thanks, it’s cool.
Piranha goes to put a beer in Maria’s hand but it clinks into the whiskey bottle that’s already there. Piranha laughs.
Maria goes inside, closes the door, and Piranha says, Okay, go.
What do you mean, Maria asks. The air in Piranha’s apartment always feels kind of thick, like they’re baking pierogies or something upstairs all day long, and tonight in the weird autumn humidity it’s a serious relief for Maria to strip off her jacket, her hoodie, her scarf, and then her long skirt.
Maria Griffiths, Piranha says, one time you came over to my house and immediately processed for half an hour about a new coat you’d just gotten. It would blow my mind out of my head if you weren’t just bursting with revelations you wanted to tell me about.
It’s funny that you’d just start in like that, Maria says, because that’s kind of the reverse of what I’ve been thinking about. I am a vocal person. I talk too much, right?
Yeah, Piranha says, on the Internet.
Whatever, Maria says. But I hadn’t been talking to Steph, like, at all. For like two years I couldn’t think of anything to say to her, but I had shut myself off so badly that I didn’t even notice.
Yeah, Piranha says.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, I cannot shut off my interior monologue without booze or pills, which sounds totally rocknroll and so high school at the same time, doesn’t it?
It does, Piranha says. She pauses for a second and then goes, Rocknroll and high school are kind of the same thing, though.
Totally, Maria says, feeling the tension seeping out of her back. She flops over onto Piranha’s bed. Thanks for letting me come over.
Well, you didn’t really ask, she says.
Maria’s like, Haha, fuck.
So go on, Piranha says.
Okay, Maria says. Here is the thing: I have a million bajillion trans things that I need to figure out, still. I am totally the Buddhist monk who’s all convinced she’s attained enlightenment! The day you’re convinced you’ve got it is when the older monk needs to pop you in the head and tell you that you are a stupid baby. And the fact that I haven’t been able to talk about my shit at all is that pop in the head.
Piranha smirks but she doesn’t say anything. It’s cool that she just lets Maria perform.
I’m just at this point where I’m stomping around like I know everything about everything, just because I transitioned and now creepy old men on the street hit on me—when really, I’m stunted back at like age thirteen, age five, age zero, when I first started suppressing stuff I knew I couldn’t say in public. Like, y’know, that feeling without words that I had my whole life like oh my god something is seriously fucked up with my body and the way everybody is reading it.
Yeah, Piranha says.
I’m just like, I need to be single for a while! So badly! I haven’t been single and transitioned at the same time ever in my whole life, and how am I supposed to have unfucked-up relationships with people if I’ve never done that? So I am excited about that. On my bike on the way over today I felt like I was flying. My lungs are all full, I feel like I can breathe—all the end of the Lifetime movie things.
So you’re getting totally wasted to celebrate.
No, I’m getting totally wasted because she broke up with me first! I figured this all out, decided to break up with her, scheduled a time, and then she was just like, I am breaking up with you. What the fuck.
Oh yeah, Piranha smirks, you decided all that on your own, and you picked the time to meet? You asserted yourself like that?
Whatever. Kind of. I don’t know. Do you want a shot?
No, she says, I can’t really drink hard alcohol any more. But go for it. Do you want a shot glass?
The ritual appeals and Maria says yes. Then she thinks: ritual, shot, fuck! I am getting later for my injection with every passing moment, which explains the mood swings.
Oh shit, she says, Piranha, I am late for my shot.
How late, she asks.
Um, like, a week and a half?
Oh fuck, she says, laughing out loud and handing Maria the shot glass.
So expect mood swings tonight, Maria says. She fills the glass and then drinks it.
Fuckin duh, Piranha says.
An hour later, Piranha’s probably said a dozen words, and Maria has said a thousand times that. Piranha’s nodding and listening, asking open questions to get Maria to go on, but eventually she’s just repeating herself.
So basically, Piranha says, your development is totally stunted, and what you need is the kind of adolescent adventures you didn’t have when you were younger.
I guess so, yeah.
Okay. So. You are single now. Do you want to have lots of sex with lots of people?
God no, Maria says. Are you kidding? How am I going to do that, and how am I going to do that with my junk the way it is, and anyway: bio-cock.
Piranha spends a lot of her time reading the Internet, so she’s super up on, like, everything. She probably doesn’t go to sex parties, although Maria hasn’t asked. But she’s talked a lot about this thing where there are lesbian sex parties that happen in the city and how they will often have No Bio-Cock Policies, meaning, No Trans Women. Or, optimistically, Trans Women: Keep Your Pants On. Meanwhile trans guys are welcome to brandish whatever cocks they want. Kind of frustrating, kind of problematic, and deeply representative of Maria’s own issues with her junk—even if she’s never actually had a partner who had issues around it. The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren’t sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.
Yeah, Piranha says. Bio-cock.
They’ve been on her bed pretty much without moving for an hour or so. Maria stands up. Stretching her muscles feels good, and she’s suddenly grateful that she didn’t just immediately get totally trashed.
What were you up to tonight, Piranha?
Heroin, she says.
Really?
Yeah.
Do you want to tell me about that?
Obviously this is significant, but it’s not really a mind-blower. Piranha’s always got pills. She’s always got something going on, some kind of illegal Robin Hood self-care. But obviously it’s kind of a big deal. Heroin’s the cul-de-sac at the end of Drug Street.
Maria, Piranha says, you are not the only one with problems.
The subtext is like, hey Maria, the world is an asshole to me all the time and you haven’t even asked how I am.
Fuck, darlin, she says, I’m sorry. What’s going on?
Piranha flops heavily down onto the bed and sighs. You know I’ve been saving for bottom surgery for like a decade, right?
Yeah.
And you know I’ve got a fuckin chronic pain fucked-up health thing or whatever.
Yeah.
Well it never occurred to me until this week to look into whether one would complicate the other, she says. And it turns out they do. Pretty bad. The surgeon I wanted to see won’t even touch somebody whose body breaks down like this. My second choice won’t either. The only one I can find who will do it is really fucking expensive, in Thailand, and not particularly reputable.
Shit, Piranha, I’m sorry.
Yeah, she says. So it’s like, I kind of doubt I’m ever going to have a vagina. Which sucks. So I’m indulging.
I didn’t know you had connections for—Jesus—Heroin.
Craigslist, she shrugs.
So what do you do, shoot it?
Nah, she says. A needle in my leg every other week is too many needles for me. I snort it.
Yeah, Maria says. She sits back down on Piranha’s bed, but gently. One of the first things they bonded over, in the car on the way to Michigan, was serious fear of injections and how weird it is that the desire to get estro
gen into your body can trump that fear. But every time, both of them stare at that leg for hours, listening to album after album, before they can actually stick that needle in and inject.
Injecting heroin, of course, makes Maria think of high school. Doesn’t it make everybody think of high school? In the Cow Town she had a friend who hated everything. Like, he was a racist, he was a misogynist, he hated queers, he hated his parents, he hated school, he hated movies and music and hippies and jocks. Obviously mostly he just hated himself. He worked in the receiving department of a Wal-Mart, carrying heavy stuff around, and every couple weeks he took all the money he made at that job into Philadelphia, spent it all on heroin, brought it home, and shot up two or three times a day until he ran out.
Pretty classy.
But they were friends. Eventually Maria figured out in therapy that their friendship worked because she was emotionally shut off trying not to be trans and he was emotionally shut off being an addict, so they could hang out and be emotionally shut off together. He was always trying to get her to shoot up, too. She never did it though. She snorted lines from his bags a few times and once or twice she gave him twenty dollars to bring back a couple bags for her. She never got hooked though. She’d do it once or twice and then wait a week, terrified of losing control, but a little bit fascinated by the glamour of it. It was the era of heroin chic.
So Maria is aware that heroin totally rules. Like, being asleep rules, and being high on heroin is like being asleep times twenty. You just feel at rest. Mostly she would snort five or six dollars worth of heroin and lie face down on a carpet somewhere, hoping not to be disturbed, eventually puking somewhere.
She stopped doing it when she left town for college, stopped talking to people where she was from and stopped having a connection.
Piranha is explaining the justifications that surgeons have for not operating on people with endocrinal and immunological situations like hers. Maria’s just looking at her face, though. She’s gorgeous, but not the kind of gorgeous where you want to shove your hand down her pants and your tongue into her mouth—the kind of gorgeous that you want to marry and keep next to you all the time. Her cheeks make up the majority of her face; her eyes and hair are the same shade of brunette, two shades darker than her skin; her lips are full enough to match her cheeks. Some trans women mostly date other trans women, but Maria probably isn’t strong enough to handle shared trauma like that. But for a second she wishes she could date Pirahna.
Fuck, darlin, she says again. I wish there was something I could do.
Yeah. I wish people would come if I had a benefit. Like trans guys who have top surgery benefits? Fuckers.
Haha, she says to Piranha, yeah, it’s pretty much you and me against the entire world.
You and me against the rest of the queer community, she says back, only she’s not really kidding.
23.
They watch movies. Heroin isn’t cocaine; Piranha doesn’t do more than one or two more lines all night, and she doesn’t chatter away. She actually looks way less stressed than usual, just kind of lying back, watching zombies eat faces and monsters destroy New York, but not really responding to anything. Maria falls asleep. Piranha probably does too.
Then the sun is coming up through her one small semi-opaque window. Maria snaps awake and realizes that she has to go to work. She carries razors and makeup with her; she runs the water until it’s hot, gets a presentable shave, does her eyes, and checks in on Piranha. She’s sleeping calmly, chest rising and falling, same clothes as last night. It’s awesome that she’s got this moment of peace; Piranha really does have way more shit to deal with than she deserves.
Maria, on the other hand, leads a super-charmed life. Steph broke up with her, she went to her friend’s house and got drunk, and then this morning she doesn’t have anything worse than the same headache she has every morning. Jesus. She considers riding her bike all the way to work, but that’ll take forever from out here, so she buys a coffee and a bagel and gets on the train. She kind of resents spending two dollars on a Metrocard, though.
Mostly what she’s taken from her conversation with Piranha last night is that she needs to be extremely irresponsible in her life from now on.
She has a journal! An honest-to-god paper notebook journal like our ancestors used to use. Fully aware that she is going to get coffee all over herself, she arranges her bike, messenger bag, coffee, and bagel in a way that lets her write in it. She ends up scalded and stuff, but whatever, she hasn’t written in this thing literally in a couple years except for the doodling she did at Kellogg’s the other night. Maria reads so much that she assumes one day she’ll have an idea and put together a Great Anti-American Novel or two, so she always carries it. Mostly it is phone numbers and addresses and doodling, though.
OCTOBER 15TH.
Piranha’s on heroin.
She can’t think of anything else to write, though, and after four and a half words her hand is starting to cramp. She can type all night, but with a pen, not so much. Maybe she should keep a haiku journal, in a non-appropriative way. It wouldn’t be appropriative to write like Hemingway.
OCTOBER 15TH, PART 2.
I am a soldier in the First World War. I don’t have very many feelings. I drink a lot and girls like me. We had a long conversation about whether she should have an abortion, but we didn’t use the word abortion. The whole thing was a dream and I am dead.
It’s the sort of dumb, self-conscious stuff she used to write when she was a kid and nothing really mattered. She used to get stoned and write about vampire dinosaurs, or write a review of a rock show for the school paper without mentioning the band’s name at all except in the headline. She’s been single for twelve hours and she’s already regressing back to sixteen.
She wonders what she’s going to do after work today. It feels exciting.
24.
She almost kills everybody getting her bike and stuff off the train in the morning rush but whatever. You can’t help but look cool carrying a bike up subway stairs, and then she’s on the street and it’s pouring. It had been gorgeous out by Piranha’s house. She doesn’t have an umbrella, but she does have a hoodie, so she pulls up her hood and says fuck it. Rain rules. She’s all ebullient, and weirdly can’t wait for her lunch break so she can write in her journal again.
There is always construction everywhere in Manhattan, which means that it’s easy to find a spot under a tarp overhang thing to chain up her bike so it doesn’t get rained on any more than it has to. She goes into work, regretting a little how wet she is, but whatever. She clocks in, finds a radiator way back in the Irish history section, and throws her hoodie over it: fire hazard schmire hazard. The Irish history section rules because almost all of the books’ spines are green and because it’s around two corners from everything else, which means the managers never really go there. Like, if they do, they will catch you trudging your way through John O’Driscol’s history of Ireland and scowling, but they almost never do. Mostly it’s just the occasional lost customer. Or Irish person.
When the air is humid from rain like this, the humidity mixes with the dust that’s literally all over everything in this store and you can barely breathe. It means you need to take a lot of breaks, leave the store a lot, you know? Maria goes on her first walk at 9:45. She’s like, maybe pizza for breakfast?
This is Manhattan and tons of pizza spots are already open. Breakfast pizza is irresponsible to her belly, and she can’t afford to get a bagel for breakfast and then also pizza plus coffee and then, later, lunch, but also, whatever.
Irresponsibility. Maria’s never been irresponsible. When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever. That’s when responsibility at the expense of self became a habit: she did not care about school, but she knew her parents would be sad if she didn’t go
to college, since certain things are expected from you when you do well on standardized tests, so she scraped by and paid attention. Then, with drugs, it’s like, she took them all, but always in such moderation that it wasn’t really dangerous. Even when she was throwing up or incoherent, it was in a controlled situation. She never went to jail, never had the police bring her home, never got caught breaking curfew or went to the hospital or anything. And then she came to New York, paid her rent, had a job, kept her head down, had relationships with people where making the relationship run smoothly was more important than being present in it. Which did not work. It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life. It has been fucking everything up.
She buys a vegetable slice and walks back to work in the rain. Further, being irresponsible totally works out for her. The only way she’s been able to keep this job and not lose her shit completely is by taking lots of trips outside, spending lots of time reading instead of working, helping wingnut old man customers for hours at a time even though they’re not going to buy anything. Or riding her bike dangerously: she got doored yesterday, her hip is still sore, and guess what, that is a pretty good story. Or even this morning, on the train! She spilled coffee all over herself, took up tons of space, and ended up reminding herself how much she enjoys writing total bullshit in her journal.
She’s like Sigmund Freud: she can come up with a million examples to support whatever bullshit theory she wants to support. And being completely irresponsible for the first time in her life is so appealing that she is fully willing to build a case for it.
She’s the Sigmund Freud of Irish history.
When you are trans, you are supposed to know everything about men and everything about women and the ways they interact and the important differences that lubricate the dating book market and how ultimately everybody is fundamentally the same but also fundamentally different. And when you first transition? For the first couple years, you totally think you do. You have dated girls all your life, but as a boy, so you have this experience of knowing what it’s like to be a straight boy, but now you are a girl, and, more and more, the world is seeing you as a girl, and also the girls you are dating are now relating to you differently than the other girls you used to date used to relate to you. Also, now you’ve been on a couple dates with boys, so you feel like you are this great authority on what it’s like to be a het girl. And you just want to talk about it, all the time, because it feels like such a revelation: oh, now I get to act this way on a date, and oh, now I have so much insight into why my old relationships would always fail, I am Nietzsche’s fuckin’ uberlady, and oh man I am so smart all the time I just want to tell everyone how the world is.
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