Steph’s car is a little green Civic from about a dozen years ago. Relatively fancy. Clean. There’s a CD player, a radio, a blanket, a water jug. They used to go on road trips sometimes. It’s been a while.
She clicks her seatbelt, lets out the clutch and realizes, Fuck man, how do I get to Piranha’s neighborhood again?
One time Steph observed that Maria tends not to be very performy, and when she is performy, it’s almost always for herself, not for anyone else. She thinks about that as she’s pretending to push buttons on an imaginary GPS on the car’s dashboard. It’s a problem, you grow up reading about punk and grunge and earnest dude rock in all the magazines and internalizing the idea that artifice is totally bullshit, man, and we wear these clothes because they’re comfortable, not for any kind of fashion statement, and we’re just trying to communicate, not be cool, and then you transition and realize, oh shit, there is going to have to be some intentionality in the way I present my body and my actions. I am going to have to break the patterns of clothing and voice and hair I’ve had in place all my life if I’m ever going to be read the way I want to be read. Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you’re white, male, het, and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
It’s like the Buddhist thing where the Zen master goes, Show me your true face, and the student goes, Sure, here it is! And the Zen master goes, No, show me your true face, and the student goes, No, seriously, I am, this is my true face, and then the Zen master goes, Get the fuck out of my house, you are not showing me your true face, and then the student goes AAAH I AM SHOWING YOU MY TRUE FACE WHAT TRUE FACE ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT NOBODY HAS A TRUE FACE and takes a swing at the Zen master and the Zen master dodges it all easily and sits back and goes, ahh, there it was, you don’t have to leave my house after all.
There’s probably more to it than that, but what Maria took from that story when she read it was: frustrated angry face is true face.
So she’s driving to her friend’s work, to crash at her house with, like, semi-permission, in a semi-stolen car, and also she’s planning to buy a bunch of heroin and split town. That feels good, it makes her laugh out loud. She has two CDs in the car. One of them is by Fugazi. She turns it up. She’s sixteen, but she’s the right sex this time, and it feels mostly liberating and exciting but also a little sad. You can’t help but feel sad for fucked up, confused, couldn’t figure out which way was up inside her head little sixteen-year-old Maria. Not just sadness, but like this enormous empathy; I feel for you, kid, but I swear to god, your life is going to get better than you can imagine right now.
Forty seconds after getting all excited she’s tearing up a little. While she starts to cry, Ian MacKaye yells his head off and guitars scratch at the speakers. Maria is in love with her life and her bad intentions and kind of excited to be gone and mostly excited to get a shot into her body. She is not going to forget to give herself that shot when she’s at Piranha’s, she’ll make herself remember so her feelings can get back to normal, her tits can stop aching, her head can clear up.
She finds her way to Piranha’s neighborhood eventually. She stays close to the BQE without actually getting on it because that thing will fuck you up. She’d also just rather drive around neighborhoods, waiting at lights, looking at stuff and listening to music, than sprint over there all fast. Whatever. First it’s Bushwick, then she’s in Williamsburg kinda, then Bed-Stuy, then on the other side of Bed-Stuy it’s like Park Slope, where the rich lesbians and white people with babies dressed in forty-dollar sweaters live, and then it’s... who knows, maybe this is Cobble Hill? Some other neighborhood, and then some other neighborhood. The buildings are getting shorter and further apart and then she’s in Piranha’s neighborhood.
The area reminds her of Cow Town, Pennsylvania, in a surreal way. Like, obviously, it’s not mostly woods and farms and sparse highways, but there’s an impressive diner where old people eat breakfast 24 hours a day, and there are people dressed in impeccable clothes from the Gap or Aeropostale or, like, the Nike store and other kinds of places that are only in malls, and cars that look kind of new but not very new, fluorescent-lit dollar and thrift stores. Whatever. It just feels way less urban than the rest of the city. Which is fine, just weird. There’s also a beach in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is this huge and variegated city of its own that became a part of New York City in the Great Mistake of 1898. Maria learned all kinds of stuff about Brooklyn when she got here because when she moved here it wasn’t Cow Town and she fell in love immediately.
Piranha’s job is that she is a cashier in a drugstore. She likes it because she doesn’t have to be responsible for much, she makes enough for rent and food, and she doesn’t have to leave the neighborhood. Once she told Maria that if her job didn’t make her interact with people she didn’t know, she would never really talk to anyone. It’s a free-standing building with its own parking lot on a long, wide street of low buildings and parking lots.
Maria parallel parks the car on the street right out front and goes inside. Her heart races for a second because of how many times she came into drugstores when she first transitioned to try and secretly buy makeup, without anyone knowing, convinced that everyone was staring at the trans person, knowing she was trans, judging her, and cracking their knuckles before they beat her up. Nobody looks at her though. Piranha’s the only one behind the counter and there’s a long line, so Maria goes to poke around for a while.
There are these Precious Moments figurines, they’re like porcelain, little kids with giant eyes handing each other a heart that says LOVE on it, or rolling around with a puppy? Maria stumbles into a whole aisle of them. Tears start welling up in her eyes, again, which is totally not tough and totally not punk but which also you totally can’t lie about. Like, they’re depictions of this idealized childhood innocence, right? This idea that little kids have the potential for sadness in their giant eyes, but really they just know these pure emotions: love, happiness, whatever. It’s totally hokey and stupid and obviously a construction. Real little kids are as dirty, impure, and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be. But this sort of thing gets her all melodramatic and choked up specifically because of how fucked up she was convinced she was when she was little. She didn’t know she was trans, she couldn’t put into words that she was a little girl, but she did know that something was horribly wrong and she blamed herself for it. Other kids could stomp around and punch each other and sleep at night, but she was this self-conscious mess who liked books a lot because sometimes people in books seemed as bewildered by the world and themselves as she was. She was never a little kid who could get a puppy and be happy about it. If you’d given her a puppy, she would immediately have started worrying about what if she trained it wrong, what if it ran away. She would already be sad that it would die.
She looks at the porcelain things for a second. Kids’ moms had kept these in glass cases in their living rooms where she grew up, so they’re also kind of a sad reminder of the Christian culture that raised her, which she’s rejected. She stops herself. She wipes tears away, one on each side, and goes to see if the line to Piranha’s checkout is still there. It is. She is ringing somebody up but she sees Maria’s puffy eyes and goes, You’re not allowed in the Special Moments aisle, Maria. Then she throws her keys at her. Who knows why Piranha has so many keys on there: the garage opener, the fuzzy thing, the prickly rubber thing. It’s more of a bog knot of stuff than a key ring.
Do you have a break any time soon? Maria asks.
Nah, she says, Not for a few hours. You okay?
Yeah. I think I’m gonna get out of town for a couple days.
You gotta get one of those iPhones, Piranha says, scanning a box of tissues. Keep your Internet constituency updated.
Fuck my Internet constituency, Maria says, The whole problem
is like, feeling like I owe my Internet constituency some fuckin—
Piranha rolls her eyes hard at the woman she’s ringing up. Right: she’s at work.
Sorry, Maria says. But listen. I was just wondering. You remember the Craigslist thing we were talking about last night?
Piranha’s eyes widen for an instant, then go back to normal.
Forty-nine forty, she says to the woman she’s ringing up, and then to Maria, Yeah, how come?
I was just wondering if I could get that number, she says.
It’s an email, she says. She swipes the customer’s credit card and then scribbles an email address on a scrap of register paper. It ends in 420.
Okay, thanks, Maria says. I’ll see you in the morning?
Sure thing, she says, already ringing up the next person. Maria had forgotten that they were kind of in a fight.
29.
Back at Piranha’s house she emails the guy. Writing an email asking for drugs is complicated because you don’t want to talk about how, y’know, you’re trying to buy a bunch of drugs, but you also don’t want to use a bunch of doofy, vague language: Hello, I would like some of the Stuff my friend got from you, can I come over please? After parking outside Piranha’s place, throwing her bag and coat on the floor in the kitchen and deliberating for a while, though, that’s pretty much the email Maria sends. She worries that dude’s not going to get back to her tonight, which would kind of wreck her plans to be gone forever in the morning, but he emails back right away.
How do I know you’re not a cop, he writes.
She emails back: I don’t know. I’m not a cop. I’m a girl who’s grumpy and leaving New York forever and wants to bring a bunch of. Um. Stuff with her.
How much, he emails back. They are basically instant messaging via email, like our ancestors did, but maybe you kind of expect weird behavior from drug dealers. It’s been a while. Maybe this is what it’s like now.
I don’t know, she sends. Like four hundred dollars?
Come over tomorrow morning. We’ll still be up.
He sends his address, which is in Williamsburg. He’s probably some rich white college kid who comes from money and thinks he’s untouchable. Maria hadn’t thought to ask Piranha what he was like.
Rad, she emails back. She sets her phone alarm to wake her up a little before Piranha gets home, only realizing much later that avoiding Piranha is consistent with the social and emotional rampage she’s been on, and lies back, excited that it’s not even ten yet and she’s going to get some actual sleep. She puts on a movie about a monster who lives in a river, and every once in a while he flips out and, like, physically rampages, killing or kidnapping people. It’s a pretty good monster. She doesn’t make it to the end, but it’s fine, she’s seen this movie before.
30.
She wakes up with the alarm in the morning with a single huge thought in her head: I didn’t get my shot last night. She considers getting out of the apartment, maybe doing her estrogen shot in the heroin dealer’s bathroom, maybe getting it in the car at a rest stop in New Jersey. Then she decides that, no, this isn’t the exciting irresponsibility she was thinking about yesterday. Not giving yourself your shot is like slamming your fingers in a car door over and over, or forcing yourself to drown a kitten every morning or something. Totally unproductive.
She keeps her shot stuff in the cardboard box they mail it to her in. If you’ve got a prescription, you can actually get it pretty cheap; rule out the surgeries she can’t afford and being trans is more or less affordable. It probably works out to about fifty dollars a month, just for the testosterone blockers she takes twice a day and the estrogen she injects every other week. Theoretically.
She puts on shaving water to boil and sits on Piranha’s bed. She cleans off the bottle with an alcohol pad, pulls the estrogen into the syringe with an 18-gauge needle, flicks out bubbles, switches out the 18-gauge needle with a 23-gauge one. Then she cleans a spot on her thigh with another alcohol pad, cleans it again, picks up the needle, and breathes heavily for a minute.
It’s very, very hard to inject yourself with a needle. She hates it and will never get used to it. This moment right here is the reason she’s so fucking late for her shot. The excitement that comes with the beginning of transition has worn off and now this is just a shitty thing she has to do to herself sometimes. She pictures Piranha walking in after work, after giving Maria the email address for her heroin dealer, and seeing Maria giving herself an injection on her bed. She would know it was estrogen, if for no other reason than that Maria is injecting it into a muscle instead of a vein, but she would still say something sardonic and mean and hilarious. Then she pushes the needle an inch deep into her thigh, pulls the plunger back, and injects. It doesn’t really even hurt.
The water boils. She shaves, puts on makeup, and digs out a pair of jeans from her bag, not because she doesn’t feel like wearing a skirt any more but just because she feels tougher in jeans and she’s going to be traveling soon.
The drug deal in Williamsburg is totally uneventful. Dude is right off fucking Bedford Avenue, in this huge, fancy converted loft building where rent probably costs fifteen hundred more dollars a month now than it did fifteen years ago. He has sideburns and a tastefully ripped t-shirt, counts out forty bags, takes the four hundred dollars, and that’s that. They even say thank you.
Her hip creaks when she gets back into the car and she realizes she hasn’t even looked at the cool bruise she’s probably got from when she got doored.
She tucks the drugs into a sock, tucks that sock into another sock, tucks them into the bottom of her bag, and stuffs that bag into the trunk of her car. Then she texts Steph: Please don’t kill me, but can I borrow your car for a couple days? I will owe you forever.
Steph texts back: Whatever.
She’s had her shot and she’s got her drugs. She drives into Manhattan over the bridge she’s ridden her bike over every morning for the last six years. She turns up the volume on the same Fugazi album she’s been listening to since she was sixteen and makes her way to the Holland Tunnel. The sign says Holland Tunnel: STAY IN LANE.
Fuck this, she thinks. Fuck this city. Fuck this coast. What if I just go to fuckin California or something.
PART TWO
LATE NOVEMBER
1.
Star City, Nevada is fucking bullshit. James grew up in the worst fucking town and he still lives here and he’s probably going to die here. It’s stupid. It was a boomtown in the late 1800s, all beefy cowboys and ladies of the night or whatever and then everybody realized there was no fucking gold here and left for California. Then nothing happened here for a hundred years, it was just a shitty little stream dribbling down between two shitty little mountains until sometime around when he was born, in the mid-nineties, when the Wal-Mart corporation saw an opportunity for brand infiltration and blew a hole in the side of one of the mountains and put a little bridge across the middle of the parking lot so the stream could run through the middle and differentiate the Star City Wal-Mart from every other Wal-Mart in the country that doesn’t have a stupid fucking stream running through it.
He actually kind of likes the stream.
As soon as there was a Wal-Mart in Star City, the people who got jobs at the Wal-Mart needed places to live, so they built these shitty condos down the length of the stream and then when all the waterfront property was taken up they started paving streets away from the stream until they practically almost had a fucking town here. Almost a town, definitely not a city.
There’s a truckstop out toward route 80 and a couple stores that aren’t Wal-Mart (a shitty little florist, a shitty kind of big garage), but mostly since Wal-Mart sells everything every other shitty little store would sell anyway, this town is like: there is a mountain with a Wal-Mart on it. Then there are a bunch of stupid buildings on the hill spread out beneath it. Then there are some more houses around where the ground flattens out. There’s a steep road that goes straight down the hill and a less ste
ep road that swerves around the long way down the hill and last year they put in a GameStop and a Subway and six empty stores in a strip mall between the highway and the Wal-Mart. But mostly what they have is dirt and dust and nothing and majestic boring vistas and bored asshole teenagers and stars. The name of the shitty little town makes it sound like celebrities would vacation here or something, like in a dumb cop show from the seventies or a two-dimensional stage set from an old black and white movie, but really the only reason to name this shitty town Star City is that at night there are so many fucking stars above it.
As long as you’re facing away from the Wal-Mart.
2.
That’s the big picture. That’s Star City from above, the establishing shot, how it looks from the outside—not that James would know. The furthest outside Star City he’s ever been is Reno, like, four times. If you’re from Reno, Star City probably looks like some debris and nothing next to a mountain. But if you grew up here, it’s probably because your parents moved here to work at the new Wal-Mart when it opened because there were no fucking jobs anywhere in Nevada in the mid-nineties. Or something? Unless you wanted to deal blackjack in Reno. But neither of James’s parents wanted to work in a casino. Whatever. Who cares. James grew up here and it is stupid, fuck Star City.
The small picture, the tight shot, the closeup, is that James is stoned as hell, reclined in the flimsy plastic tub with the black grout or whatever the fuck it is called, the moldy stuff that seals the tub to the floor and the wall. He is hotboxing the bathroom of his apartment halfway down the hill from the Wal-Mart. Right now he is too stoned to tell if the water is hot or cold: it is probably lukewarm. Who knows. He sits up and looks at the mirror and can’t see anything because there’s so much smoke in here and also because that shit is all fogged up from how hot the bathwater was, some impossible-to-know amount of time ago. He’s thinking about how much he hates Star City and why it produces such apathetic and useless fucks: figure 1: James, figure 2: Nicole. But mostly he’s just stoned and spacing out.
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