by Sara Taylor
The bathroom floor was cold on my face and through my shirt; the hands were still in my hair and on my wrists and there was weight on my back, and I wanted to kill them. I wanted to rip them apart with my teeth. When they flipped me over I saw that I’d already made a start: one of them was holding his arm, but it wasn’t until later that I realized that he’d been muttering, “It fucking bit me!” and meant me. Another one of them straddled my stomach, reared back and punched me in the face.
I’d never been punched in the face before: at first I didn’t realize what had happened, didn’t feel pain but dizziness, my ears ringing. The guy on top of me knew what he was doing; I noticed, just before he punched me again, that he’d wrapped his hands the way boxers do. It felt like I was stuck to the floor, like I’d never be able to overcome gravity enough to sit up again. The one on top of me shifted his weight down, and I felt cold air on my stomach as someone yanked up my shirt.
“No tits,” he said.
“That doesn’t prove anything—half the sluts here are carpenters’ dreams.”
“Yeah, but how many of them don’t wear no bra?”
“I dunno. Just all the dykes and skanks, maybe? Move your ass—we came here to get proof.”
The weight shifted up to my chest, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. My vision was weird, but as I blinked I saw that one of them was sitting back on his heels, camera phone out and at the ready. The third guy was straddling my shins, and as I tried to make sense of “proof” he began fiddling with my belt, yanking down my jeans.
Suddenly I got it.
My thrashing only slowed them down a little as they tried to keep me pinned and get my clothes off at the same time. But my anger at being jumped had morphed into terror, hot and choking, underlaid like a baseline with the memory of hitchhiking in Alabama, of having my head forced down. I started screaming then, and the guy sitting on my chest flailed, trying to cover my mouth, let go of my arm so he could do it and I clawed him across the face, gouging at his eyes.
Then the bathroom door opened, swung inward and cracked against my shoulder hard enough that I was glad it wasn’t my head, and a booming voice asked, “What the hell is going on here?”
CHAPTER XVIII
I spent the rest of the day in the nurse’s office, wrapped in blankets and shaking. People asked me questions, and I wondered if the guys had gotten the pictures they were after, if the people asking questions had seen the pictures, and I wanted to die. Then I heard my mother, her voice thundering down the hall as she reamed the principal or whoever was with her at the top of her lungs, and I wasn’t surprised that he wasn’t answering back very loudly. She came in, paused in the doorway to look me over, pushed past the flailing nurse and hugged me.
“Oh. My. Fucking. God. You’ve had my kid sitting naked on an exam table for over two hours, right through lunch I may add, and you only now call me?”
“There was blood on my clothes, so they took them as evidence,” I muttered, and looked down at the floor. She kept her language under control after that, at least, but not her volume, and not her tone. You could have felled trees with her voice as she spoke to the principal, the nurse, the police, and anyone else in hearing range, and though I knew that I wasn’t the one in Dutch even I quailed a little. She made them hand over my gym clothes since they didn’t want to give back the ones I’d been wearing, made them leave me alone so I could dress, then she tried to take me home. The principal insisted I couldn’t go yet, that I had been involved in a fight, had bloodied at least one face and almost gouged someone’s eye out, and was looking at suspension. She looked like she just might strangle him with his own tie in that moment, then swept me off the table in a bridal hold and went to carry me out of the school. I insisted on being put down before she got to the door, walked out under my own steam, looked straight ahead as I passed students in the hall: I’d had enough humiliation for one day.
We drove home in silence. When we got in she made me food, watched me eat—she’d already found someone to cover her shift, was staying with me that night. It reminded me of the night that I got back from my ill-conceived trip to Alabama, and as I forked up tortellini I considered for a second telling her about the man in the car. The time seemed right for it, if there really can be a “right time” for that sort of thing, but when I opened my mouth the words died in my throat: there were still words I just couldn’t say.
“How do you feel?” she asked after the food.
“Pissed off as fuck that I didn’t hit ’em more,” I said. She laughed, but it sounded weird, like she was doing it to keep from crying.
We watched movies on the couch for the rest of the night, me snuggled into her like I was six again. But something was off—when I poked around in my head, there was a blank. The day hadn’t happened. I’d boxed up the feelings and put them away. And under the blankness I felt scared, not that someone would jump me again, but that what I wasn’t feeling would all come out when I didn’t expect it, when I couldn’t handle it, that someone else would do or say something to trigger the avalanche and I wouldn’t get to choose how or when it happened. I put that away, though, enjoyed the feel of Ma’s arm around me, the feel of being a kid, and tried not to think directly about the blankness in my head, tried not to let it know that I knew that it was there.
Ma had to go back to work the next night, but I didn’t have to go to school. Which was a massive relief. I didn’t want to be anyone’s special case, anyone’s exception to the rule, but more than that I didn’t want to worry about getting jumped, worry about people trying to see things, to have to wonder if someone had managed to get pictures after all. To wonder if the person sitting next to me had seen them.
I stayed home for three days solid while Ma made calls and arranged things, shouted at officials and social workers. When she wasn’t slinging drinks or passed out in bed she was yelling at people about me or giving me her funny concerned look, the one that told me that she was worried and she had no idea how to fix any of the things that she was worried about. I kept a low profile, or as low a profile as I could manage in such a small space with a mother on the warpath. Then, on day four, Social Services sent over a tutor, and things quieted down some.
The in-home tutor was usually reserved for kids so bad they weren’t allowed back in school, and at first they didn’t want to dish him out to me—it didn’t look good for them to seem to be punishing the victim of what was being called a hate crime, but Ma wasn’t sending me back. So the tutor came two days a week to go over everything, check my homework, and mete out assignments, and we generally muddled along OK. Ma looked over his shoulder the first few visits, but gave over when she’d satisfied herself that he was a decent guy who was giving me a decent education; the lessons were in the middle of her sleep time.
Besides what now passed for school there were few draws on my time. Once you took away all the trappings school didn’t take that long to get through, and was pretty mobile when I wanted it to be. When I found my courage again—a considerable amount of it had been left on the floor of the handicapped bathroom—I went forth into the wide, wide world just to prove to myself that I could. And though high school is, in ways, a microcosm of the rest of society, I didn’t get any more attention on the streets of Reno than the women—not the prostitutes, but the women in general—did for their heels and modest skirts, and far less than the cross-dressers and drag queens.
It wasn’t long before I got bored. I knew that what had happened at school had frightened my mom, knew that she’d always been afraid that she’d use her fear as an excuse to keep me from doing things; when I’d wanted to learn to rock climb at age nine she’d taken me to try it, and when I hit the top of a wall for the first time I’d looked down to wave to her and saw that she had her hands over her eyes, found out on the ride home that she’d spent the entire afternoon not watching me in terror that I’d fall, even though I was harnessed and helmeted to hell and back. So I leveraged that knowledge when I asked if I co
uld get an after-school job. She’d been on the fence until I pointed out that, if she said yes, then I’d naturally keep her posted as to my whereabouts, where if she said no then I’d probably do it anyway and not tell her. So she gave grudging consent, so long as I kept her up to speed on where I was and what I was doing, which left only the problem of finding work.
With all the time on my hands I’d been thinking too much, and not necessarily of happy things. So when the time came to assess my skills, parlay them into work, the memory of the man in Alabama returned, and an insidious voice whispered, “Sex work is all you’re good for—even a stranger saw that much.” And for a moment I believed it, considered listening to it and wasn’t sure if that was because I knew the voice was right or because I wanted to punish myself by making what happened in that car happen again. But I knew Ma would kill me if she found out, knew that if I went down that road I probably wouldn’t ever see my dad again.
I’d been thinking about him a lot in my free time as well, wondering what he was doing, if he expected me to come back someday or if he’d moved on. I missed him still, but it wasn’t a sharp missing, the way you feel about someone close who’s just died, but rather the dull familiarity of a well-established absence. When we first left home I hadn’t known that I should feel the sting of loss, had taken it for granted that, no matter what Ma said, I’d be seeing Dad again soon, had felt about his absence the way I had when I was small and he left for work in the morning; part of me had assumed that he’d be home in time for dinner, had assumed that since he hadn’t come home then dinnertime had yet to arrive. I hadn’t known to miss him until I’d already become accustomed to his absence.
Dad didn’t like to drive; the car was decidedly Ma’s territory. So the times that he did drive stuck out in memory.
Whenever I got in trouble—sassing teachers, starting fights, sledding through the neighbors’ azaleas or I don’t know what—court was convened at the kitchen table. Ma got louder and louder asking why I’d done whatever it was that I’d supposedly done and then answering her own questions, working out an entire psychology for whatever crime had been committed while I stood with the fear-shame-anger axis of awful in my belly, until she burned herself out. It happened every few months, and each time I told myself that it was the last time; I hadn’t seen this screw-up coming but by God I’d see the next one.
Then Dad handed her a beer, took the keys in one hand and my shoulder in the other, and steered me through the door to the front seat of Ma’s car. We usually drove around for maybe thirty minutes first, not saying anything, keeping to the back roads so we could go slow, so I could calm down. Then Dad would ask one question, like I’d told him an interesting story and he’d missed an important part, and he’d let me spew, out of order and angry, what I remembered of the incident du jour. It didn’t matter if my memory didn’t jive with whoever had already got their version in; he kept his eyes on the road, and if I paused for too long he gave me a little nudge to get me going again. I talked with my eyes straight ahead like in confession, and afterwards we stopped for a chocolate milkshake to break up the hard lump of unshed tears in the back of my throat, throwing away the empty waxed paper cups on the way home because Ma wouldn’t have understood why I deserved a treat right then. When we got in she’d be sitting at the kitchen table, the empty beer bottle in front of her, and I’d apologize as best I could, and we’d sit down to figure out what came next.
I hopped from odd job to odd job, bussing tables, selling popcorn, washing floors, spinning a roulette wheel until someone realized that I was far too young to be in a casino, working for cash paid under the table, carefully squirreling away my own bankroll. I made friends with the dancing girls and bouncers and drag queens, coaxed war stories out of anyone who would tolerate my presence, tried to make the most of the time I had in a place I didn’t really want to be.
More than ever before I was feeling the restlessness, the longing for motion, that I imagined my mother felt, but now I also wanted not just to be moving but to be the one deciding in which direction the movement would take me. I was beginning to think about going back to Virginia, considering what I would have to do in order to get there.
There didn’t seem to be any good solution. I could wait until I was old enough to tend bar and follow in my mother’s footsteps, but that was too far off. I could save up enough for a train, which would just leave me broke on the far end. I could hitch and walk my way across the country and run the risk of winding up dead in a ditch. There were options, but none of them were practical, workable options. So I hoarded my cash, made and discarded plans, and became one with the city in a way I hadn’t in Florida—it wasn’t my home but I knew the streets, knew the weather, knew the overhanging mountains, could cup it in my hands and suck its marrow, so to speak.
And so the months passed, a fall and a winter and a spring that were missing some of the seasonal earmarks, bisected by a Christmas and New Year’s when neither Ma nor I touched down in the apartment for more than six hours at a time, working all of the shifts and jobs that no one else wanted because they had people to spend the time with, traditions to keep, ascribed some importance to the time of year. When the holiday cacophony settled down Ma took me for Chinese food as a sort of conciliatory celebration, and I kept the calendar that they gave us at the restaurant, hung it in our kitchen so that I could periodically cross days off, feel the way time slipped by, measure the distances with my fingers: so many knuckles from today to next week, so many hand spans from this month to next month, so little distance between the present and the future. Just a matter of waiting, of working, of crosses on cheap paper, and we would be on the road again.
OK, I was going to leave this bit out. But I like to think that I’ve gotten too old for shame, too wise to want to apologize for who I am or what I’ve done. And I can always comfort myself with the knowledge that there’s no telling how much of it is true, how much an intentional fiction—or how much the distortion of time and wishful thinking.
Just before Christmas I settled into regular work at Cojones, a little club where the main draw was drag shows and female impersonators doing stand-up, and where I collected empties and cleaned up at the end of the night. One of the waiters at a restaurant where I’d washed dishes for two weeks had sold me a fake ID that said I was old enough, and they paid under the table, so no one scrutinized it too closely. Ma, when I told her what I was up to, had shrugged and said, “Sounds like a fun place. If anyone offers you drugs, don’t take them,” and left it at that.
The performers fascinated me: a hairy, coarse, earthy man became, through the application of makeup and packing tape and magic, the essence of feminine beauty, his voice and movement and bearing completely changed and yet something essential preserved. Most of them took to me, or at least tolerated me, and I loved being able to watch snatches of the shows in between running my ass off.
I met Simon my first night there, but it wasn’t until a week or so later that I actually noticed him—or he noticed me, rather. Simon was an eighteen-year-old Adonis, muscled, bronzed, and camera ready in his street clothes; as Ina Propriate he made the room roar with laughter and question their sexuality. In or out of drag he was a flirt; I brought drinks back to the performers ahead of the show and he introduced himself by saying I was so adorable he wanted to eat me.
We slid into being friends probably because we were the youngest two there, though I’d like to think that Simon found me as alluring as I found him, that attraction was one of the reasons that I wound up at his apartment drinking cheap rum, shooting the shit, watching bad movies, and every now and again having a field day in his closet. He presented himself as a manly man, a bit of a musclehead, but in private he was an utter whore for clothes. The first time he dragged me home was because he couldn’t live another moment until he’d gotten to dress me up, and since he seemed to want to play with my genderlessness, rather than overwrite it with what he thought I should be, I let him.
I wou
ldn’t let him see me naked, so he picked out the costumes and let me don them in the bathroom, then attacked with a basket of pins and a roll of garment tape, let me try on the skin of a roaring twenties dandy in plus-fours, a Gibson girl complete with Ina’s fake bosom, a flapper with my own flat chest under the drop-waist dress, and a passable imitation of the Thin White Duke—at least from the neck down. It was strange and not unpleasant, walking out into his living space—which was about as big as his closet space—and turning in front of the full-length mirror propped next to the television, swapping back and forth between man and woman, man and woman, and I could see where Simon’s glee came from: a touch of powder, a bit of padding in chest or shoulders, and I could be anything. And it was thrilling, too, trying on the identities that I could take up, the trappings of gender that made me look alternately like my mother or my father, as though I were dressing myself up as one or the other of them and so summoning their essence in my own frame. But no matter what clothes he put me into, how much makeup he slapped on or scraped off, there remained something off, something other about the character I saw in the mirror, and our play only confirmed what I’d long felt: being either and neither and both at once fit me more closely than the other options on offer.
After I’d let him dress me like a doll and heard him rattle on about his childhood and family, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends and one-night stands, while he pinned his clothes to fit the narrowness of my body—the alcohol or the energy drinks he’d been mixing it with had given him hummingbird-like energy—I couldn’t feel awkward around him, didn’t feel nervous drinking alone with him while watching Alice in Murderland and gossiping about people from work. So I guess what happened was only natural.
Even with the distraction of paying work I was still thinking about what happened in Alabama, had sudden, unwanted memories, sometimes images but more often a smell, a taste, a full-body sensation that I hated, that I wanted to be rid of. I couldn’t talk about it, but I wondered if there was another way of dealing with it. If I couldn’t erase the memory, maybe I could overwrite it.