by Nick Krieger
Seven. The Queer Birds and the Bees
I passed my final semester of grad school reading and writing, writing and reading, reading and writing, taking breaks only to attend class and report to my job. Whole weeks would go by where I’d barely see my housemates. Winter disappeared and spring showed up, but I was too busy to notice. I did notice that after almost a year and a half, my “temporary” copywriting contract at the bank, long past its expiration, was going to continue indefinitely unless I terminated it. Burnt out from full-time school and mind-numbing, soul-deadening work that consisted of composing variations of, “Please select your account from the drop-down menu,” in March I informed my company that I’d be leaving in early May. I planned to live off my recently acquired savings while finishing my thesis over the summer, and although I was nervous about walking away from a well-paid cubicle job, I also believed I was focusing on my passion.
I felt driven by my desire to write, to explain and make sense of my gendered experience, and I sought out connections with other people seeking to understand themselves and the world through words, mostly my writing peers at school. Over the course of the semester, I’d built a classroom-based friendship with Ramona, the sharp girl from my literature class who intrigued me even more in our workshop with her nonfiction stories about breaking into factory farms, staging demonstrations, and bailing other animal rights activists out of jail. I took notice that she referred to the guy she’d been dating when we first met as her “boyfriend at the time,” and that her feedback on my essays about packing, testosterone, and binding was spot-on.
By sharing my personal explorations with Ramona and the others, my classmates had become confidants and friends. Nobody besides them, not my A-gays nor The Boys, knew about “Nick,” the name that had popped into my head as sort of a boy alter ego. His arrival was so uneventful, I couldn’t remember if I was sitting on the toilet or scrubbing my pits in the shower when he showed up. He played no role in my daily life, unlike my other alter ego, “Fun Nina,” whom I’d created to channel the mood of my impending unemployed freedom, and to entertain Ramona by making fun of my former elderly bedtime, “Just Say No” policy to social events, and general fuddy-duddiness.
Ramona reminded me of a big kid with her department store backpack, Chuck Taylor sneakers, and round and youthful, near-angelic face—one you don’t picture screaming “Your Mother Kills Puppies” into a bullhorn. But there was definitely something badass about her, hinted at by the dark eye makeup she slathered on to appear at least her age. My youngest friend by far, she turned twenty-three at the end of the semester and threw a birthday party that served as the coming-out event for “Fun Nina.”
Ramona lived with a crew from college in a futuristic three-story house, the living room like a spaceship with its trapezoidal window cove, modern fireplace, and tubular chimney. None of them could afford the place, so one person lived illegally in the unfinished garage and another had moved into the loft, using a thin shower curtain as a door. Ramona scored the best room, the only one on the main floor, because she was the mature leader of the group, the same role she held in her family as the oldest of three kids.
She told me this at her party, where we sat next to each other on her bed, sipping jungle juice, surrounded by our mutual writer friends. Her fine shoulder-length hair had been tinted auburn for the occasion, a perk of assistant managing a salon, and a long red scratch ran down her upper arm. She’d injured herself getting ready, squeezing into a revealing yellow dress from a store I associated with tweens. I couldn’t make any sense of her fashion or style, what she was going for or whether she succeeded. But when she opened her mouth, damn was she cool.
Whatever the subject—movies, music, current events, books—she had something insightful and progressive to offer. She was the type who sent friends songs from undiscovered bands, the best clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and the top YouTube videos of the week, who stayed up to all hours surfing the Interwebz, as she called it, tinkering around late at night, getting cool while I slept.
She was also independent, leaving her date—a nerdy but nice enough guy she’d met online—in the living room to fend for himself. “We’re not really dating,” she said, scooting a bit closer to me. “I’m just using him for sex.”
I could tell right away that guy wanted to date her, but she wasn’t going to leave my left side all night if I kept up the entertainment. I told her about the two girls playing musical chairs for the seat on my right side. Both of them had once declared crushes on me and then gone into homo-panic mode when I responded with interest. Ramona had little patience or respect for their trepidation, which made me wonder if she was trying to tell me something about her sexuality. It didn’t matter. Girls were always trying to tell me something about their sexuality, only to lose their nerve later.
“Watch her pinky,” Ramona said under her breath. “It’s crawling over to you. Look, she won’t cross that third square. See, see, it’s vibrating.”
Low and behold, this girl’s pinky was doing the same two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance near my thigh she’d done with me for the past year.
“It’s not worth it,” Ramona said. “If her pinky’s prude, you’re screwed. And I don’t mean that literally.”
“I think you may be funnier than me,” I said.
“What do you mean ‘may be’?”
After the party, we continued our comedy competition through daily e-mails that, although undoubtedly flirtatious, were more of a test of each other’s wit, timing, and creative writing abilities. As part of our exchange, she sent me her online dating profile. Instead of the typical seductive or girl-next-door photo, she’d posted an adorable picture of herself with her hands clawed over an enormous vegan ice cream sundae, ready to pounce.
Mentally checked out of work, I used my last days in my cubicle to complete the quizzes on the dating site. Gender choices were limited to female and male, which I now considered sex assignments at birth, not genders, and the available orientations were straight, gay, and bisexual. Utilizing my SAT prep course training, I chose the “best option available”: “bisexual male.” I explained this to Ramona when I sent her my quiz results along with my critique of the options, the only paragraph in our two-week online exchange in which I felt forced to take a humorless, heavy tone. I was frustrated that a serious explanation was required, and that to anyone other than Ramona, who’d read sixty pages about me in our writing workshop, my choice would’ve made no sense.
To belatedly celebrate Cinco de Mayo, as well as the end of the school semester, one of our classmates threw a Seis de Mayo party. It was one of those rare summery days, blistering hot, even out by the beach, and I camped out on the back deck with a margarita in hand. While chatting away with my fellow writers about all the work we should’ve been doing, I kept catching myself checking the sliding-glass door for Ramona’s arrival. Each time I looked, I reprimanded myself with a lecture that concluded with: Do NOT pursue another straight girl. Even if Ramona was different from the other I-want-to-but-I-can’ts, the last thing my nascent gender identity needed was to be the object of some twenty-three-year-old’s lesbian awakening.
The moment Ramona arrived, I jumped up to greet her, forgetting all about my mandate. I followed her to the kitchen where she handed me one of the zucchini and mango tamales she’d prepared. The food display, which included a whale carved out of a watermelon and filled with fruit, was almost as majestic as the centerpiece in the living room. From a polished silver tray, a bottle of blue agave tequila rose, towering above a dozen shot glasses. We were standing too close when our host opened the bottle. “I don’t do shots,” I said, taking a step back.
“ ‘Fun Nina’ doesn’t do shots?” Ramona taunted.
I held up my margarita cup to show the inch of liquid still left on the bottom. She held up hers to show the same before tilting it back and downin
g the rest. The ice cubes clanked against her teeth. “Your turn,” she said.
“Are you trying to get me drunk?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. Then she laughed self-consciously. “It’s not like you have to work tomorrow.”
“Or this week. Or next week.” I sucked down the rest of my drink and joined her for a shot. Which turned into another. And maybe another. We must’ve stopped once the bottle was empty. By then, the sun had fallen. Ramona’s roommate, Katrina, a party tagalong who’d recently broken up with her boyfriend and required a lot of attention, ushered us from the deck to the living room. A fire was crackling in the fireplace.
“Let’s play a game,” she said, pulling Ramona and me down to the hearth. A petite brunette, Katrina had mischievous, trouble-seeking eyes. I liked her because she reminded me of myself at her age—functional yet out of control with a creative spirit she’d probably harness once she stopped mainlining cheap wine.
Still holding our hands, she leaned forward. With the flames blazing behind her, she looked possessed, like a horny imp. “Who’s the cutest boy here?” she asked.
I paused to give the question serious consideration. “It’s really not the best dude showing,” I finally said.
“You’re just bummed Joshua’s not here,” Ramona teased. I’d made no secret about my narcissistic crush on the stocky, neurotic Jewboy who could’ve been my twin brother.
A piece of wood snapped in the fireplace. We all flinched. They each gripped my hand tighter. Ramona didn’t let go. “Well, I think Nina is the cutest boy here,” she said. Her green eyes turned crystalline in the firelight. I turned to Katrina. Her jaw rested open. I looked down and stroked the frayed end of my cargo cutoffs. The hair on my legs had grown in brown and thick, like that of a boy, like the cutest boy there. Even through my blitzed haze, I felt the colossal power behind Ramona’s words, her validation all the more pronounced because no girl had ever acknowledged me in that way before. She might as well have said, “Open sesame.”
I remember the two of us kissing on the railing of the deck outside and on the long train ride back to her house, and in her bed, where I woke up the next morning. Okay, I do remember more than that, but drunk sex is kind of like drunk driving: you bury it afterward, thankful nobody got hurt, knowing you did things you wouldn’t ordinarily do, and hope it’s never mentioned again. With the sun pounding through the bedroom window and into my skull, I asked Ramona if it would be all right if I left.
“Go,” she said. “I think I’m still drunk.”
I got up and dressed quickly, stuffing my binder into the back pocket of my pants. I pecked her on the lips good-bye.
“Hey,” she called out when my hand was on the doorknob. “Congrats on getting laid.”
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” I replied reflexively. The banter, the intoxicated oopsy-daisy sex, the fleeing, that was all second nature to me. I closed her bedroom door behind me and looked down the long hallway into the living room spaceship. What now? I thought. I tipped my head back against her door. What now?
Later that night, I rationalized myself out of attempting to date Ramona with a laundry list of concerns: she was young, with no real life experience; she wasn’t athletic; she didn’t ride a bicycle; we had little in common besides writing; she lived like she was in college; she was really, really young. Maybe I flowed down my river of reasons to spare myself the pain of starting a relationship that would, in my mind, undoubtedly end, or maybe I was trying to spare myself the anxiety that came with physical intimacy, but I always had my reasons, and all they’d ever left me with was a headache.
This time, I did my best to let my brain rest and did what all the kids were doing. I purchased my first text-messaging plan and put my thumbs in charge. When Ramona sent me a text every few hours, I’d simply respond with something witty. By evening, I’d be at a bar with her and Katrina, on her post breakup bender, and by late night, I’d be in Ramona’s bed. It took two weeks for us to finish an evening closer to my house and end up in my bed.
It was the middle of the night and the glow from the streetlamp seeped through the thin blinds, lending us a dim light. Ramona tucked the corner of the pillow underneath her head, pressing her cheek into the feathers. The yellow cotton of my auto mechanic T-shirt crawled up around her neck. I fought the urge to take in Ramona, in my clothes and in my bed, as if once I did, she’d vanish, drop me for someone that made sense, like an actual dyke, or something uncomplicated, like a walking erection. “Why do you even like me?” I asked, immediately embarrassed by my vulnerability. “Wait, don’t answer that.”
She inched her pillow closer to mine and surprised me by playing along, assuaging my insecurity with a short list of my better traits. “But mostly I like you because we’re from the same tribe,” she said. “You feel familiar, like we’ve known each other for a long time.”
I touched her cheek. Her skin was so smooth, untainted by life, yet there was something old and wise inside. I thought about smell chemistry, previous lives, cosmic ties, all the mysterious reasons people connect, everything that defied the explanations I craved. Despite myself, I liked her.
It was only later, when our mutual writer friends or the few A-gays I still spoke to outside of the larger group asked if Ramona was even a dyke, that I considered her tribe statement profound. I would always reply, “No, she’s vegan.” Sure, I was being a smart ass, but in a way Ramona’s eating habits did seem relevant, as did her upbringing in a born-again Christian cult until she was a teenager. It was part of my tribe theory that she was so used to living on the outside, as other, that her feelings for me didn’t trip up her place in the larger world she’d never really been part of anyway. And besides, it was a crucial part of our relationship that Ramona saw me as a cute boy, not a dyke, from the get-go.
During those first few weeks of sex, Ramona ignored my breasts as if they’d been redacted, and yet they still harassed me. If I wasn’t wearing a binder or a sports bra, every time they moved, I could feel a sense of my own presence slipping away, an awareness of being inside my body fading, my old hookup autopilot trying to take over. But now that I’d met others like myself, I respected my own physical discomfort, treated it as real and valid, and sleeping with someone who accepted this as a premise for being with me empowered me to make adjustments. When disturbed by my breast-hang, I’d mutter my annoyance and pull her on top of me, or sometimes I’d just keep my binder or sports bra on in bed.
As I offered more verbal and physical cues, Ramona began to pick up on, and test ways to touch my chest with an “Is this okay?” I liked it when she ran her palm down the hard center line of my sternum or stroked a flat outstretched hand across my binder. When I shared that I had crazy awesome nipple sensation, but complained that any action there triggered an uncomfortable awareness of my breasts, Ramona reminded me that everyone has nipples. This helped me to close my eyes and hold on to my self-image, visualize my hard, flat chest while she touched me there. We could’ve compiled a rulebook for acceptable positions, but in the end there was only one: enforce my understanding of myself, my internal reality, that I had a dude-like chest.
A super-sexual person, Ramona had humped her bed while reading the Bible as a child, and as I teased her, had probably rode her umbilical cord in the womb. With our increasingly constant sex, I was struggling to maintain the necessary mind-set to stay present with the booby traps around every bend in my body. To avoid giving her a complex, I kept the depth of my challenges to myself until one night, when my roommates congratulated me on my one-month anniversary with Ramona. Erin had moved out immediately after her breakup with Bec six months before, and now it was only Jess, Melissa, and me, paying a bit more rent for some extra peace. Jess and Melissa were in the living room, telling me how proud they were of my one-month sex streak, and it set me off.
“I can’t take it anymore,” I e
xploded on to the two of them. “I feel like I’m having lesbian sex.”
“What the heck does that mean?” Melissa asked.
Remaining in the kitchen, I took a few steps closer to the couch where they sat with their laptops, and let my mounted frustrations spill out. “There’s just so many tits in the bedroom. Four of them. And mine are soooo much bigger,” I whined. “They take up all the space in the room.”
Melissa laughed in her half-amused, half-bemused way. Her breasts were huge, and I waited for her to concur, but only Jess nodded, prodding me to continue.
“It’s like even when I’m in the moment, I’m watching from the outside,” I said. “And all I can see are two people with the same bodies. Women.”
Now they were both nodding. Only Melissa spoke. “Isn’t there any way you could, I don’t know, get out of your head and stop watching?”
“I’m trying,” I complained. “But when I stop thinking, I tend to feel things more.” I told them about a fucked up word I’d learned in Costa Rica for lesbian. “Tortillera. It means tortilla or something,” I said, mashing my palms together. “And every time my crotch rubs up against her body, it’s like I hear . . .” I began to smack my hands together. “You. Don’t. Have. A. Dick.” With my outburst came such a release of energy, of shame, that I felt calmer.