The Lucky Star

by William T. Vollmann

  He now kept his femme clothes hidden in a violin case at the back of Marjorie’s closet. From the catalogue concerned with LEATHER SHOES IN ALL SIZES (10–12 medium black only), he dreamed over high heeled pumps called Carmen, Faith and Tricia, but they were too expensive. His self-conception resembled the tremblings of a woman’s umbrella in the wind.

  By now his father had forgotten everything about Frankie’s girly side; that was how his father loved him, by forgetting. And Frankie could only love his father by hating truth. He became Judy, then rushed home to masturbate. Afterward Judy’s memories of this period took on the grey-green and reddish glitters of tiny stones swirling in a funerary mosaic.

  Sweating and blushing, he told his parents that he had a date with Marjorie. His father gave him money. Then, almost choking with anxiety lest he be caught, he walked the sixteen blocks to Mabel’s Club, drank a semilegal vodka and ginger ale and danced with a hairy-bellied drag queen named Princess who wore nothing but false breasts and a big black figleaf. He held her tight, and she was very kind. She was the one who knew that death is called Little Wisdom. In between kisses he told her that he wanted to be Judy.—Then do it, she said. He confessed that he just couldn’t, at which Princess purred: What if I command you to? and his seventeen-year-old penis sprang up like an Apollo moon rocket.

  Princess lost interest in him, but the next time he went to Mabel’s, after drinking alone until he felt sorry for himself, his neediness lighted on a hard-built woman of fifty or so, whose square face, cropped hair and wise old eyes were comforting to him. He began weeping silently. (In those days he had not yet learned how to do it on purpose.) The woman watched him. He watched her. Finally he decided to look at the floor until he died.

  Failing to die, he looked up, and the woman said: Hi, pervert.

  Hello, said Frankie.

  2

  She lit a cigarette and said: It’s funny that people only identify us based on our sex lives, and they call us the perverts. They’re constantly applying their categories to us based on what we occasionally do, not based on who we are. My name’s Sylvia, by the way.

  Thanks for talking to me and I’m really really sorry, said the boy.

  You’re sorry, and do you have a name?

  Frankie.

  Are you in trouble or just sad?

  I don’t know.

  I can see that. Did you run away?

  No.

  You mean, not yet! Show some spunk! Or do you plan to stop being a pervert?

  I can’t.

  I grew up gay, obviously. I would never recommend it. It was hard, for sure, having to hide who you are. My stepfather beat me for falling in love with my straight girlfriends. Oh, you know about that, hey? And I’ll bet you know about can’t have a gay person in a locker room! In reality, my locker room experiences were, don’t look. You were trained as a young person at least in my era to not look at people whom you can’t have. That still sticks with me as an older woman. I don’t look at straight women sexually. I don’t do anything to disrespect their space. When you fall in love with your friends and you can’t do anything about it, it can hurt. It’s funny when they use that against us.

  Frankie listened. It was then that he commenced his lifelong habit of asking women to tell him stories.

  Well, boy, she concluded, go and be a pervert.

  3

  And just as Nancy Kerrigan’s family took out loans in order to pay for her skating lessons, so Frankie borrowed money to finance Judy’s little surgeries. By now he worked in a shoestore, but his wages defrayed almost nothing; the lender was poor Marjorie, who still hoped for the best.

  Much later, Judy remembered her with the kind of love which derives from gratitude: Marjorie never ever outed her. If only she could have given that girl what she wanted! And in those later years, when Judy swung both ways, it would have been easy and fun to please Marjorie—assuming she could desire a flabby-breasted, hairy, male-bodied old bitch with a penchant for humiliation . . .

  On that subject, it may be too reductive to claim that the corporal punishments she received at home made her into a submissive, but consider the following: MGM aborted Judy Garland’s first baby against her wishes. (Joseph Mankiewicz once remarked that everybody from the MGM executives to her own mother treated her like a thing.) She had her second abortion by choice after the father, the bisexual Tyrone Power, read her love letters aloud to the Marines. Thus the detestable became the consensual.

  Judy’s Godfearing mother frequently guaranteed her a fiery afterlife on account of her failure to use the penis as our Lord had intended; there was another truth worth hating. Hating her body, Judy decided to rise in the flesh, because outside the flesh exists nothing.

  Once at Mabel’s she saw her lesbian angel again. So she asked her about God.

  Sylvia replied: I was raised Catholic and I don’t want any part of it. I would never hurt someone even if I didn’t like you. And I’m not that wonderful of a human being. And then this amazing entity called God will throw you in the firepit just because you did something shitty. Do you believe in God?

  I want to, said Judy.

  Well, we went to church every fucking holiday: Spanish Mass, English Mass; it was just horrible. I remember one Sunday, I don’t remember why we couldn’t go to church that Sunday but I was happy about it; my godfather was praying to one of the Jesuses up on the wall and was praying and crying and screaming for forgiveness; I was thinking, this guy Jesus is kind of a dick because we go all the time and yet we’re in trouble now. This entity that’s supposed to be the most kind person of anyone is the one that punishes us.

  Judy was convinced—because she had not yet met the Goddess.

  Still hoping to find or become something as strong and competent as Martina Navratilova’s hands, she lived out the years when closeted gay men called themselves friends of Dorothy, meaning of Judy Garland’s most famous role.—Sylvia had said: I think that someone’s coming out or making themselves public is their own choice. If they feel threatened or uncomfortable or fearful coming out, I would never, never push them out. I would talk about my own experiences and be their friend. I would only guide them through what was best for them.—And Judy most definitely felt fearful.—She hitchhiked all the way from the animal-bearing to the human-bearing trees of Paradise. Because covetousness was a sin and she coveted womanhood, which everyone assured her she would never attain, she felt as guilty as possible, all the while believing that from Frank’s once upon a time could somehow be born Judy’s happily ever after (just follow the Yellow Brick Road). Passing through New York City too late to see Chris Moore performing as Marlene Dietrich at Lee Brewster’s club, in that most famous spell when Chris’s face was still milk-smooth and she shook her head no to all her sweethearts, making tiny jingling sounds with her long earring-bells while plumping out her lips into something even better than a cunt, Judy was transported equally well by that same floor show’s wide-smiling drag queen whose bowling-ball breasts commanded a wide field of fire indeed. She who first thought to know herself from what others said about her, who used to go to church to get cursed for being what she could not help but be, who would later pretend to know herself by eavesdropping on what was said about the lesbian, still hoped not to be sacrificed—as if she got to act like a man whenever she felt like it, and could then go back to being a woman simply to gratify her own lewdness. She looked into the mirror and said: I’m disgusting.

  As her finances allowed, she visited the cosmetic surgeon in Oakland who took Travelers Insurance (electrolysis limited to one-hour sessions), and dropped in and out of Paulette’s charm school in San Francisco. In those days trannies who wished to insult each other would use the word homosexual. Latin trannies were called cha-chas. Judy was that ugly faggot.

  4

  She threw herself at a bright-eyed T-girl named Kimara, who looked well put together with her pu
ffy hair and that frill-line down the buttons of her dark blouse; by then Kimara’s wife feared going out with her when they were both en femme, ever since a drunk had attacked them at a Halloween party. Judy felt the same fear. But it certainly did help to be a masochist.

  You’re not mature enough for a relationship, her new friend explained.

  Tell me what to do, said Judy; please please tell me!

  Come out of the closet.

  Well, how did that go for you?

  Kimara replied: I think for the most part I was really defensive and I said it was none of their business, and I do have this strong face in front of other people but it made me question myself. Then one of my really good friends—there were four of us, we would hang out all the time, she was almost like a sister, and I would sleep over—she was fine with it, but she told everybody in school and she made it seem like it was no big deal and she did not do it with any malicious intent. Well, Judy, I was really angry with her; I wasn’t ready to come out because I didn’t know what it meant, because you hear about bullying; you don’t wanna carry that with you, and having people ask you all of these things makes it harder to deal with it . . .

  Judy decided to live a little longer as Frank.

  5

  By 1988 she was almost ready to make a down payment on the big operation, but her hooker friend Danielle who later achieved true fame by getting raped and murdered scared her by describing what it had been like to wake up among cruelly contemptuous nurses who declined to give her enough Demerol; oh, Jesus, said Danielle, and then the stench when your vaginal dilator comes out, and then one of them damn nurses pounds it back in with her everlovin’ fist, and you’re screaming . . .

  A year later Judy found herself confessionally drunk in the Ocean Club beside a quiet middle-aged lesbian named Reba who listened, patted her hand and consoled her: Women, we don’t come out. We don’t go out. It’s harder as you get older. When I was coming out, that’s where you met somebody, in a bar. But I tell you, women complain. They just don’t come out.

  I want to come out, Judy sobbed, and sometimes I am out, but I . . .

  You’ve got a long row to hoe, dearie. Someday you’ll be ready to be who you are. You still believe in God, don’t you?

  How did you know?

  Reba laughed a little and said: Even though I can sit here and say I don’t believe in God, I still want to hold on to that golden ticket. You have those fanatical straight people telling you you won’t get into heaven, and there’s a little part of you from childhood that makes you believe it. I did everything I could do to get kicked out of church. I did the worst thing: I got pregnant. I already had a father at home, so what I need one in the sky for? I think that was the first and only time I stood up to my Dad, because I said, they don’t practice what they preach. And what could he say? Because he only showed up there for weddings and funerals.

  And then what happened? whispered Judy, fascinated.

  I came out. They disowned me. I told ’em it’s your loss not mine; come back when you’re ready. I didn’t talk to ’em for a year. Then they called me.

  You must have felt so humiliated . . .

  I mean, I can see they had their own inner struggle, but I threw it in their faces every time I could. I always brought my girlfriends home until the day both my parents were dead. Then I went to an island—

  What do you mean?

  Judy, you’re not ready to understand this, but there’s a place for you. It’s a place of women, and if you come out there, I promise you’ll be loved. But you have to come out and—

  Well, said Judy, it must have been easier for you. Because you look like a woman, a really really pretty woman, and I just don’t.

  Let’s look at what’s inside of Judy, not at what’s outside of Judy. Women are not judgmental as far as a woman’s body goes. I think we find the inner beauty more than the outer beauty. Because we’ve been judged all our lives.

  Judy could not have said why that made her cry, but it did. She got up and ran away. Six months later she went back to the Ocean Club, but there was no Reba.

  Ingesting a tab of lysergic acid, she grew very proud to win supernatural proof of the way that every other Earthling had single names while hers was doubled everywhere right through clouds and steel although no one knew of its doubling; once she came down she still felt that proof but could never explain it.

  6

  At Jingle’s Bar in Vallejo she made a hot connection with a Cheyenne girl, kissing her and kissing her while fondling the girl’s cunt, but the girl’s ignorance caused Judy misery and terror which thickened about her mind until she could hardly see outward and downward to the truth: Judy was no longer a boy. And Judy kept dressing up more and more until the Cheyenne girl called her sick and crazy and returned to her parents.

  Then she was living in Hollywood with a certain Norma Jean, who was crazy about her; their roommate was a young woman named Bunnie, who started fucking Norma Jean, just for a joke, after which they became a couple and left her. She cried herself to sleep, then dreamed that she was even more beautiful than the real Judy Garland.

  In San Francisco the Black Rose Bar was still open in those days. There Judy met an old man who invited her to come see his autograph collection, the prize item being a communication from the most famous American transsexual ever, Christine Jorgensen. The envelope was printed MISS C. JORGENSEN, 31752 GRAND CANYON DRIVE, LAGUNA NIGUEL, CALIF. 92677, and the note, dated 1975, read: I thank you for your interest. Judy thought she had never read anything so classy.—The old man unzipped his pants. He said: Know why I picked you, honey? ’Cause you’re as plug-ugly as I am.

  7

  Never as lucky as the famous tranny Angela Douglas (born Douglas Carl Czinki), who got arrested in Olympia, Washington, for hitchhiking on the freeway, after which, because she already passed so beautifully, they placed her in the women’s section of Thurston County Jail, where she spent the whole night fucking a sex-starved young girl, Judy kept seeking love and pleasure, achieving mostly humiliation in skirts. Those were the years when ultrafeminists reserved the divine right of definition. They got to insist and argue over who was truly female. And so Judy was rejected by the Daughters of Bilitis for her male-identified behavior. In the East Bay Express she read an ad from a lesbian organization called SLUTS: Sisters Loving Unlimited TortureSex. Hoping to be torture-sexed, Judy attended a meeting, but was expelled on account of her penis. When she started blubbering, they jeered at her. On the way downstairs she realized that she had expected this to happen.

  Money being the best medicine, she answered another more transactional advertisement, and soon a laughing Goddess was punishing Judy’s testicles with electric wire and she had to thank the Goddess after each scream. Six weeks later she got raped by a cop and loved it.

  You gotta flipflop, advised her hooker friend Danielle. I’d be bored if I was top all the time, or bottom all the time. I’m not into pain, but I don’t mind a little injury.

  I can’t be a top, explained Judy, because I don’t deserve it.

  Whatever gets you off, yawned Danielle.

  Bunnie had told her about a lesbian retreat up in Mendocino County. Judy bought a Green Tortoise bus ticket and rolled straight there. To increase her desirability, or as we more often used to say, her marketability, she was wearing a “black widow” waist cincher. Approaching the check-in tent, she passed a handpainted wooden sign which read:

  “I would like to see women realize that the punishment we feel has been created by men.”

  —Arden Eversmeyer

  Bracing for the worst, Judy now received her own male-created punishment. Calling her rapist, appropriator and agent of the patriarchy, they ran her off. The next bus for Los Angeles would leave in ten hours, so she, desperate to lurk out of sight, checked into a highwayside motel; and here her luck changed because a little blonde runaway w
ith no place to go knocked on her door in hopes of using the shower, and within twenty minutes she was teaching Judy how to be a better girl: Don’t you know that lesbians make love using their hands? Look, Judy. Here’s what you do . . .—and Judy’s spirits rocketed up to Cloud Nine!

  The blonde was named Kara. Judy loved her more than anyone ever. So she proposed that they become a couple. Wide-eyed, Kara nodded. So they did it again, the young prostitute’s pupils expanding deliciously into semi-precious marbles and all sounds dimming into silence. Phrases flittered behind Judy’s eyes and she could not decide if they were trite or remarkable; then they began to ring like music. Kara lay passed out and breathing heavily. Judy ducked into the bathroom to, among other business, perfect her imitation of that dreamy and somehow grainy smile of the young T-girl in Vallejo who stood so still in her prom dress on the night before she was beaten to death. When she came out, Kara was gone, along with twenty dollars. Judy sat down, sobbing and slapping herself in the face. Then she cheered up, thinking: At least I’ve learned how to make love using my hands . . . !

  8

  So lonely that no one would hide her from her death, she practiced saying things to the mirror, such as: The results have been so amazing, or, I wouldn’t change a thing. Then she memorized the proverbs of Judy Garland.

  Yes, Judy was a masochist—but only because she would do anything to feel like a woman! (Trying to look alert and in the mood, she made herself as bulging-eyed as a certain Etruscan Sphinx.) The alternative was to live out the tale of the thirty-four-year-old, delicately pretty black T-girl who was serving eight years at Stillwater Correctional Institution in Illinois for inscribing graceful signatures on other women’s checks.

  So there she was, lifting up her blouse to proudly sadly lasciviously show off her big new estrogenized breasts, as she shyly peeked through eyelashes whose length rivaled that of her high heels. Still hoping to connect with anyone at all, woman to woman, she ran out of luck at a certain illegal after hours club. Her second arrest educated her with a glimpse of transsexuals covered with blood in the holding cell. Next time, because she had been caught in the act of fellatio while wearing men’s clothes, they placed her among the male prisoners in the police bus; they were shouting obscenities at the drag queens in the women’s cage at the back, as were the women. An accused murderess pulled off a drag queen’s glasses and stomped on them; everybody cheered. Judy felt sick with excitement.