Growing Up Golem

by Donna Minkowitz

  When I saw her later that week at our first real date, I got a better look at her. She was a femme, but much taller than my mother, like a beautiful drag queen. We were eating ham and cheese sandwiches with loud-tasting pickles at a wine bar. Our knees knocked together under the table.

  On a stoop a block away, where she kissed me, everything felt simultaneously goofy, perfumed, and alluring. Homeless men panhandling at the subway entrance laughed at us for kissing. She put my hands on her ass. Nobody had ever done that before! I thought she looked exactly like the ancient Greek goddess called the Lady of Wild Things, and in fact I soon discovered she could make plants grow practically by breathing on them. She did silly voices of frogs and ducks to entertain me: “Quack. Quack. Quack. Ribbit!” After we’d spent a few months together, I found out she’d been kidnapped and raised by a goblin family in the Mines of Moria, but had escaped. She danced her way out, because the sight of dancing, I have learned, makes goblins lose their screws. We moved into a convenient apartment in a leafy, ungentrified neighborhood. Sometimes all you need to recover your lost kingdom is good access to the R train. Reader, I married her.

  Epilogue

  Recently, I came home to her one evening after physical therapy. "What's a good definition for gender?" Karen asked idly. She was preparing to give a sociology midterm, and ironing both of our shirts at the same time. I kissed her mouth, which always tasted like a particularly vivid and purple sort of plum, and began to chop up an onion for our tomato meat sauce. I got the pasta out ("The squiggly ones!" Karen cried happily, "my favorite!"), and was delighted with how the chopped tomatoes glowed as they sizzled in the pan. I looked over the draft of Karen's equally sizzling, radical midterm, while she began reading my day's pages. As I lit candles, Karen kissed my face. "I don't know how I got here," I shouted, "but I'm never going back."

  .

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped me with this book. Eileen Kelly and Ann Darby nourished this idea from a small spark, and gave me vital suggestions. Matt Mitler, Vincent Collazo, and Karen Lippitt read a gazillion drafts and gave me feedback, and Jane Shufer and Mishti Roy provided crucial advice at critical junctures. Karen Schechner gave me the sort of magical aid that helpful animals do in fairy tales, and Vicki Nevins made sure I was on the right page with my depictions of RSI. Elyaqim Mosheh Adam generously looked over the Hebrew and Yiddish (though any errors are my own), and Vincent Collazo kindly converted the entire manuscript to Word for me. I really don't think they make literary agents as sterling as Valerie Borchardt anymore. Nor do they make dream publishers like Don Weiseat Magnus Books.

  A half dozen or so dedicated and imaginative health professionals have helped me to heal (to one extent or another) from RSI. I cannot say how grateful I am to Aija Paegle, PT, Steven Fetherhuff, CPI, Dr. Susan Richman, Dr. Ming Liu, Dr. Ming Zeng, and Dr. D.S.V., and to a succession of massage therapists including the nurturing and smart Vlada Yaneva, LMT.

  There just aren't any words to thank Karen Lippitt for cohabiting with me.

  About the Author

  Donna Minkowitz's first book, Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me about Sex, God and Fury, won a Lambda Literary Award. It was also shortlisted for the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Visions Award "for the most promising and distinctive work by a new writer." She was a columnist on LGBT politics and culture for the Village Voice from 1987 to 1995, as well as a political columnist for The Advocate. She has also written for the New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, Salon, and The Nation. Minkowitz won the Exceptional Merit Media Award for "In the Name of the Father," a creative nonfiction piece in which she disguised herself as a sixteen-year-old Christian evangelical boy to write about the Promise Keepers for Ms. She has appeared on Charlie Rose and many NPR programs. She lives in New York.