What else? A whole garbage can’s worth of johns.
She burst out laughing. They got shitfaced on Old Crow, and then to take her mind off her dead sweetheart he retold with added details the shining tale of one of his bygone triumphs; it involved an illegal immigrant, three grams of crack cocaine and a child’s red dress with a bloodstain two and a half inches long on the left side of the underskirt toward the front; after the happy guilty verdict our transwoman, resting her head on his chest, licked her thumb and turned the coarse, moisture-sucking page of the National Enquirer to learn: DOLLY IN LESBIAN PAYOFF SCANDAL! Singer pulled into GAY SISTER’S EMBEZZLEMENT case.
10
Vacation time again: He took her to Hollywood!
Emerging from the rental car, they stood on the hot silent curve of Ivanhoe where the stairs went down and down the hill past Judy Garland’s house; the gate was open so that they could look into the yard: unkept, with piles of brick. Later she would wonder whether she had mixed up that place with the house on Lakeview Terrace at Armstrong—a smaller house, actually, only a mile from the one on Ivanhoe, with a car in the garage; had she begged him to, the retired policeman might have even run a check on the license plate. In the cell phone photo she took, it had a boxy Frank Lloyd Wrightish look; at first she intended to crop out the limp palm on the corner, but it was so hot; she had gained back nearly all her weight and her slacks clung to her sweet plump thighs, which he kept pinching; it was already almost midday, so where was the traffic? So this was Silver Lake: so gentrified and jolly! . . . and nobody around but Latino gardeners walking from house to house (the kiddies all at school); the retired policeman said this might be the wrong address—Lakeview Terrace and Armstrong, right? They waved at the pink-clad joggerette who pounded toward them on the sandy path that passed for a sidewalk; she declined to wave back. At the next Judy Garland site, on McCadden, which Judy had written McCaddan with an “a” instead of an “e,” they pulled in on the sidewalk and a man who was walking his dog glared and began pounding on the hood.—Fuck you, said the retired policeman; anyhow they couldn’t find it amidst all the apartments; on the bright side, they had already learned from the studio tour that the noise of a kiss is added to the soundtrack by somebody lip-smacking his inner elbow, that the tornado in The Wizard of Oz was actually a big sock filled with dirt and tied to a revolving fan, and that the Wicked Witch of the West caught on fire when she fell through the trapdoor, after which the studio managers made her drive herself to the hospital. So they turned from Fairfax onto Fountain in hopes of approaching the next house; up on Sunset past Hillcrest it became all trees and hedges, with the houses set well back; Judy had never seen anything so exclusive. Around the wide curve with the green mowed median strip he drove them; they crossed Foothill Road and then Alpine Drive; finally on Ladera they saw the signs for movie star maps. Bel Air Road was all gate and no sidewalk, two-tiered hedges and mown grass, castles going up the hill and right on Bellagio Road. Judy was tremendously impressed.
They were high above the statewide drought, humming past green grass and hedges and trees, with gardeners kneeling worshipfully over flowerbeds. As they wound up Stone Canyon, the road narrowed, then dead-ended in a no trespassing sign and four gates; the security guard said he didn’t know nothing about no Judy Gurrand. So they drove on into the shade of cool ivied trees. A blonde who was walking her dog alongside the lovely tree-ferns thrust out the palm of her hand so imperiously that they stopped in awe to let her pass. Their adventure continued into the raw arid hills behind it all; there was a bamboo grove behind a fence at number 1231, then they were on the other side of Sunset, swooping into South Mapleton Drive, Holmby Hills, by a driveway which ascended to a gate; it should have been number 144, but nothing remained between 130 and 200, the latter impressing both of them with gas flames in coach lamps on either side of an opaque gate, and lovely twisty trees with red flowers growing out of them, with a mansion beyond.—It’s another world, said the retired policeman, struggling to be nonchalant; well, he was correct: Even the gardeners were slow and quiet, wandering from hedge to hedge with their leafblowers shouldered like ceremonial rifles.
11
As for Shantelle, her rendezvous with Xing might have been her last triumph. Although I do remember how through a narrow gap in the curtains the morning sunshine enriched her luxuriant reddish-blonde ringlets, which her hairdresser had already striped with long edge-strands of peach and of chestnut—half of her head remained in shadow, and there its most conspicuous hair-stripes were a pallid white, while the most noticeable parts of her sunstruck hair were the darknesses between curls—she had already begun to look old, and the booze jacked her up more than before. On certain midafternoons I would now catch her softly murmuring into the mirror: Goodnight, Neva . . .—In the last days of Xing our discussion of the fentanyl became a sort of disagreement, and Francine, the only one who ever paid attention, saw the transwoman’s look of excitement when Shantelle punched me in the face. On my return from the hospital two days later, the retired policeman summarized the next chapter: Francine had risen up instantly from behind the bar and tapped her on the side of the head with a baseball bat, then dragged her away as lovingly as a crocodile. Shantelle got eighty-sixed for good. (No one believes me anyway, she said.) By the time the Y Bar closed in 2017 and Karen Strand’s high school finally “updated” its mascot from an Apache Indian to some more progressive entity, Shantelle had gone positively sketchy. Now where was she supposed to do her business? Just after the Gay Pride parade of 2019, Xenia, who was amused by her and sort of liked her, claimed to have seen her in San Mateo alongside a tranny whore whose breasts had been installed in Tijuana and whose penis still functioned, but Xenia was sometimes a bullshitter and had told me a comparable story about herself; and the retired policeman now informed me that Shantelle got arrested both for an outstanding warrant, for which she was supposed to serve sixteen days, and also for a probation violation, for which she should have served thirty days, so that added up to forty-six days, which in the interest of fairness they rounded up to eighty-six, so that she lost her longterm hotel room with all her possessions, together with her security deposit, and accordingly became homeless. Here is what I know:
Once upon a time, an old black woman who wore a long dark blanket tucked around her face and dragging in the street behind her used to ask each person at the streetcar stop for matches or cigarettes. When they said no, she sometimes asked again and again. One day she boarded the L Taraval streetcar and sat down facing a young man who high-fived her. When the security guard came to check tickets, everyone but her had one.
The guard said: You’ll have to get off here. Let’s go.
The woman ignored him.
Get off, said the security guard. Get off. Now.
She sat there laughing. The man who had high-fived her laughed along.
The security guard spoke into his radio. Then he stood back, waiting. Nothing happened all the way to Van Ness station. The woman and her friend shrieked with laughter.
Then a policeman boarded.—Let’s go, he said.
The woman ignored him. She told us all: There ain’t no other woman in the whole wide world but Neva. Nobody.
The officer put his hand on her shoulder, and she screamed. Stepping back, he rolled on a pair of black rubber gloves, then jerked the blanket off her, presumably to make sure she carried no weapons. She began thrashing and hollering.
Let’s not make an issue of this, he said.
He pulled her to her feet, while the slender, fragile young security guard stood triumphant. He marched her off the streetcar and sat her down on a bench. Another officer strode behind her, in case of trouble. Then our double doors closed, we hummed westward and that was the last I saw of Shantelle. Thine enemy the Serpent hath been given over to the fire.
12
Judy Garland once said: I don’t believe dying is the end, which proved true—for th
e transwoman retained the lesbian’s torn blouse that still smelled like her. The retired policeman smiled sadly whenever he saw her snuggling it; he wasn’t jealous anymore.
And as for me, I never forgot that I had been nothing before her and I was nothing after, so what did I have to complain about? I did weep, if not as easily or copiously as the transwoman, who was expert at what she considered to be this important feminine skill. Then I drank down another rum and sodapop. Trying to remember the two of us, which is to say all of us, and the way that she used to suck the breaths out of our mouths and then breathe back in; longing to remember better than I could, I could almost see a naked man and woman, carved of whitestone, her hand on his arm, her breasts high and alert, their heads both gone.—Now as I lie here with my jacket zipped up to my chin, lurking like a lesbian who has not yet come out and shivering beneath the blankets while the fever blows flute-tunes up and down my spine, loyalty insists that without her I shall never be warm again; but loyalty will also freeze to death. If it were truly revealed to me how many of us on this earth have been raped I would not believe it, because I could not bear to. And if I had it in me to look down into all the things that men and women do to each other, what then? Better to stare through the ceiling with my bloodshot eyes and pretend that I will never get over Neva.
In her way she was as successful as Nancy Kerrigan, who after winning her first bronze Olympic medal got commercial endorsements from Society Airlines and Smirchee’s Tastee Soup. Moreover, she behaved well until the end. All the same, some of us now began badmouthing the dead lesbian. Why not? She was guilty for everything.
13
Let’s keep it light!—as Judy Garland wrote in a letter to Motion Picture, right around the time she was preparing to kill herself.—I have many times been as lonely as the transwoman used to be when kneeling down in a stack of wet newspapers in a glaring humming laundry room and orally pleasuring a stranger for money or sometimes just for degradation; I too have gone over the hill and into quietude, listening to the rain on Powell and Clay, the cable car wires marking time, the round portholes of dryers dark and still in the laundromat at the Parker Hotel; all the while—fuck, yeah!—I’ve kept it light! When we lay out a dead girl’s grave goods two thousand years after the fact, we’re frequently lucky enough to collect a few of her lost memories which might as well have been lovely irregular coins with images of vulvas, insects and hydras; and these, or the hope of these, keeps it light, or something. So I tried hoping; I excelled at that. A nearly empty cable car came groaning up the tracks toward the horizon of blinking red lights, hesitated, then sank over the edge.
Why I should have ever gotten depressed, I certainly don’t know. You people have proved to me that I’ve got thousands of friends the world over.
Judy Garland
AFTERWORD
This novel completes my “transgender trilogy,” which also includes The Book of Dolores and a still unpublished tale entitled How You Are.
Most of The Lucky Star takes place shortly before and after the legalization of gay marriage in 2015. (For slatternly narrative purposes I have stirred in anachronisms from 2016 and 2017.) Some bars and apartment towers are imaginary; likewise certain streets and alleys. Despising product appellations of all kinds, I found cruel pleasure in coining appropriately idiotic brand names for liquors, junk foods, retail establishments and cars.
As for my characters, although they too are imaginary, I seem to have met several of them—for instance, the wise and helpful young lesbian in Seattle who told me that “consent is a huge part of our feminine culture,” and that “there’s never a time when you would not respect boundaries.” (I awarded her an island and magic powers.) This is a tale about the violation of boundaries, and about those strategies, inspiring, pathetic, sacrificial, unhealthy and otherwise, through which the violated try to go on living.
Given my subject, how could The Lucky Star not address unluckiness? I believe that many of us lead sad lives without knowing it, and that our society is sick. “Celebrity idolification” and near-impossible standards for female beauty cause still more sorrow for those who feel saved from utter anonymity only by their own ugliness. The commodification of life has been further debased by an education in incuriosity. These American values color the thinking of all classes. The Hollywood actress, the showgirl in Las Vegas and the transgender streetwalker in San Francisco all seek to “sell themselves,” performing allure in hopes of hooking the desires of others. Thus the ideal, and some people achieve it, for awhile. By definition, the majority fails. Judy Garland’s adoring public can neither be nor have her; they can only yearn for her. As for Judy Garland herself, I wouldn’t live her life for a million applause generators.
In short, The Lucky Star may be my most cynical book. Sexual abuse, street crime, poverty, illness, police violence and addiction saunter through its pages, dressed in the lurid livery of false consciousness.
But no matter how damaged we are, we can all aspire to love others and ourselves. This is why I sought out stories from women who perform their own versions of femininity, publicly and vulnerably: trannies, lesbians, showgirls. I found these research interviews to be quite simply uplifting. Like my characters, the interviewees deserve a far better world than they find. The bigotry, shame and self-hatred that so many of them have faced would have crushed me. In affirming to the world who they are and whom they love, they exemplify a beautiful female strength which occasionally moved me to tears. Two old women at the GLBT center in Las Vegas were so direct, self-accepting, funny and relentlessly defiant that I could not help but love them. Meanwhile a middle-aged retired dancer (now a housewife) shared with me the bravery, glamor and drudgery of her former life; a young activist trusted me with the tale of her first girlfriend; a women’s studies professor described her experiences with puberty and shame. Without exception, these women implicitly or explicitly encouraged me to pursue the life-affirming question how does one go forward? The best compliment that I could pay them all was to allow a few patches of light into The Lucky Star.
And so nearly all of the female coming-of-age stories, straight or otherwise, and of course the accounts of sexual abuse, come straight from the lips of those who helped me with this book. To be sure, the characters are composites. For example, the biography of the transwoman Judy is partially constructed from memoirs in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and partially from interviews, all seasoned with appropriations from Judy Garland’s life.
Since my outlook is reliably dark, the matter of how to help Judy blossom in her new identity perplexed me. When I asked my genderqueer friends in Seattle what advice they would give this flamboyantly self-despising victim, they said: “We’d tell her to embrace her inner disgustingness.” And this became a key to the novel.—I would be very proud if anyone who suffers the shame and isolation associated with nonconforming sexual identity were to gain any hope from The Lucky Star.
Of course it cannot be a tremendously hopeful book. Maybe I should have choked down Shantelle’s fentanyl instead of writing it. But people can disagree in good faith as to whether Christ’s story was happy or sad; so why not respect the ambiguity of my heroine Neva? In her I tried to imagine a sexualized female Jesus, who, like her original, must have been tremendously damaged, but radically powerful thanks to unstinting self-sacrifice.
Now let me tell you a secret: The real title of this novel is The Lesbian.
When I begin to write a book, its seed is nearly always a title which “just came to me.” And this one came to me so fittingly! Here we have a parable about labeling and discrimination. Of course The Lesbian’s main character is not a lesbian, which is exactly the point. And every time she appears, the mock-portentous echo of her appellation with the title and the many homophobic epigraphs should have magnified the sad irony of her situation.
After more than a year of pressure from Viking, pressure which finally became, s
o I was told, unanimous, I capitulated, offering four second-rank titles from which the shadowy naming committee could choose. I gave in because I had already pushed this generous publisher to the limit by refusing to cut my last (and typically not very saleable) book. I did so with the urging of many who loved me, out of worry that my longterm stubbornness might destroy my career. I did so because, like Neva, I sometimes lose myself in putting up and shutting up. Most of all, I did so after gentle but remorseless requests from my friend and editor Paul Slovak, who has fought many battles for me, and, like me, is getting old and tired. Paul, I did it for you.
This little defeat is unimportant to anyone but me. Or is it? Why was Viking so insistent? Why should it be unacceptable for me to publish a book with the word “lesbian” in the title? Would I have gotten away with it had I been born with different equipment between my legs? What does my surrender say about our time? What will be forbidden next?
Paul, I did it for you. (Now I’ve come around to liking The Lucky Star. I can even tell myself I picked it.) But maybe, just maybe, I did it after inhaling a whiff of herd-fear, which weakened me. That is why whenever The Lucky Star meets my eyes I am going to feel sad and, what is worse, ashamed.
Reader, please do keep my secret. Don’t tell anyone what the real title is.
WTV, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and a few islands, 2014–19
NOTES ON SOURCES
EPIGRAPHS
“Since there are so many literal gaps in the tattered texts . . .”—Jane McIntosh Snyder, Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho (New York: Columbia University Press, Between Men—Between Women ser., 1997), p. 3. [By the way, I have dropped in a few allusions to Sappho here and there. If you like, you may even find specific correspondences between us of the Y Bar and Sappho’s lovers Irana, Atthis, Dika—how I remember the garlands in her hair!—Gongula, Kleis, Andromeda, Anaktoria and Brachea.]
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