Courageous Spinelessness

Friday I left UNC's Spine Center rubbing my chapped mitts with the kind of joy one gets from a new medical diagnosis (surely the Germans have a word for that). "Brachial Neuritis or Radiculitis Nos" said my important papers--I couldn't wait to google.

As it turns out, Brachial Neuritis typically follows injury "such as gunshot or stab wounds" or follows a viral infection or surgery (double mastectomy, anyone?). It does have a genetic marker, is fairly rare, but basically no-one really knows what it is or how it functions, but it might be an auto-immune response.

It struck me that the language around this syndrome was very much like fibromyalgia, which I had been diagnosed with nearly a decade ago, with some strong differences. Brachial Neuritis is a "man's disease." Fibromyalgia, at least when I got it, was a "woman's disease." Doctors treated me as if I was a Victorian lady, hysteric, suffering from the symptoms induced by my own lively imaginings, as if I had indulged in too much busy manly brainy work and was now suffering the consequences. "Women who have been sexually abused get it" said one doctor, fairly rolling his eyes. Had I gotten fibromyalgia from stab wounds or gunshot I'm sure we all would have been much happier.

I'd like to suggest something, something dangerous. I'm going to (for one, for once) ignore the ridiculously preferential and gendered medical language and suggest this: what if this uptick, this surge, in auto-immune responses, in disease where our bodies seem to "feel too much" or "feel the wrong thing," is an evolutionary move towards the kind of all-bodied sensorium of octopuses?

My spine is crumbling, encrusted with the barnacles we call spurs--but I believe like a fossil, my original spine is nearly gone; it has been replaced by the minerals and shell bits and heavy metals of my past. I believe we are moving towards the kind of embodiment that "thinks" with its arms--like an octopus--that our bones are attempting to shore us up against what we have sunk into this earth, poisons and pesticides, and that our central nervous system, being overtaxed by impact, the crashings of sensations from constant electric immersion (tvs, cell phones, electricity) is both attempting to protect and to extend itself because it needs more room.

Enter then, this new being, still bilateral, still sentient, but sensing and thinking from its softened arms and legs. The fad for muscularity will presently be replaced by a delight in bodies that can move in even more spectacular ways, requiring...drum roll please...a surgically implanted (at first) flexible spine, allowing our new being to squeeze under doorways and through cracks like mice. Later, this being will have no spine at all.

The pain I feel, radiating from the various injuries to my spine, my chest, my self, might actually be evolution. The delicious, damnable, brutal heavy electric stabbings of evolution. You with me? If you, like me, have experienced interstitial cystitis, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, fibromyalgia, and now some kind of hyperalgesia induced by multiple incidences of violence not limited to but including (as they say) car wrecks, assaults, concussions, mosh pits, then you might feel a reluctance, anger even, by the suggestion that your pain, your trauma, is some kind of motherfucking evolution.

Sisterbrother, I feel your pain. Let's look to the octopus for a sec. The octopus brain isn't centrally located like ours, or rather, it has dense neurons everywhere--it does something like "thinking" with its arms. (I do something like "thinking" with my....oh never mind.) This makes it a supreme test subject. The octopus is often used as a lab animal because of its incredible intelligence, its unique capacity to experience life through not just its enlarged head, but through its eight motile arms. As a test subject, it is an uncommonly able subject--its sensorium is geared for sensation, for pain, all over. Not like we are. More, I imagine, how those of us with amped up sensations are, those of us for whom a whisper of wind relays stark horripilation, whose bones require battening against the everyday, whose fascia begins to set after a second, rendering ordinary movements like getting out of ones chair an excruciating exercise in what feels like breakage. The octopus, particular as test subject, is my kin.

How then, to relinquish what many of us feel is our only raft in a terrifying ocean, that is, our identities as disabled? Too many transfolk I know have one or more of these diagnoses, and I'm confident this isn't merely because I gravitate to people of similar experience. Transbodies in particular (like octo-bodies) are subject to the kind of abuse that leaves a neural stamp, the imprimatur of pain...Transbodies in particular are forced to be complicit with the medical industry, to get our hormones, our surgeries, our care.

I am, just for today, relinquishing this identity, except for bureaucratic necessity. I am willing to explore this idea, this embodiment, this, these pains, as yes the result of myriad abuses but parlaying themselves into exploration, into a riot of sensation yearning to be without armature, longing for and making exodus to a free body, a body that moves any way, goes anywhere, is free, not of pain necessarily because pain is important--a body that is always, already oceanic and celestial. I can bear some of this pain with the knowledge that my sisterbrothers after me might endure less, that bodies might move to...dare I say it aloud? Invertebrate. Sister Sea Slug, wrap me in your tongue-like body; naughty nautilus, invite me to tea. I will slip underneath the heavily guarded and locked laboratory doorway and free all my kin, all my octo family. Are you in?

Boys with their Baby Vein Faces Shining Neon

It's been dark around here, I'm not going to lie. I have friends whose ability to stay tethered to this dimension seems fragile and full of pain, the pain of lusty, unhinged cells replicating and replicating. Just as they seem to become full of something Not Themselves and slow of pulse and breath after so much quickening, do I become leaden, full of bile and blood. I feel like rot watching my friends be sick.

I myself am enduring one of many detoxes. I am in a some kind of perpetual withdrawal state--kicking one chemical after another in an attempt to relieve my own constant neuralgia, being prescribed cymbalta, vicodin, gabapentin, lexapro; getting rolfed and massaged and acupunctured and just generally torturing myself at the gym. I am in a state of pain I'm confident would be solved by opiates, and indeed, they bring such a sweet relief it's almost ridiculous. Like, why aren't we all on opiates?

I watched the Peter Weller documentary about William Burroughs, a man I had the good fortune to meet not once but twice, and actually spent an afternoon with. Peter Weller comes off as the biggest kind of art douche, but Burroughs? My kind of guy. I was heartened to hear that he struggled with dope til the end. Not in some kind of schadenfreude way, but because I struggle with dope now and again. It's a solution to a lot of things. I was a heroin addict in my twenties and on methadone for nine years. It has a way of changing you. Or rather, I came to it because I was already changed, I was already awash in some other stream, one that neither parallels nor crosses the so-called "stream of life," one that creative people seem to wade and occasionally drown in. Burroughs was so charming. You can be charming on dope, junk, to use Burroughsian vernacular.

In my neurochemical jazz fest, the one that's happening in my brainy parts right now, I recall Burroughs coming to the book shop I worked at. I ran in a crowd that worshiped him. We both did and did not understand his genius. It's taken me years--getting older does that, you ripen, your memory cells accommodate and imbricate information in gratifying ways. Stanislavski, the great actors' teacher calls it Emotion Memory. You overlay and shape memory with your new experiences, archiving and adding like a hypermotile librarian in the Strand Bookstore of your brain. Burroughs came to Lambda Rising, in Dupont Circle, where I was employed as a cashier/book seller/only one there. We carried his books in 1980 to be sure, but they didn't sell. Nope, gay men bought sad, horny romance novels by Gordon Merrick, and Inches and Blueboy. Not Genet, not Burroughs, not even Rechy. There I was, all New Wave-punk lesbo behind the cash register, reading Fleur du Mal and Seasons of Hell, Naked Lunch and Queer, all written by homosexual geniuses. You can imagine the attitude I was handing over with your change.

Burroughs came upstairs to do an impromptu reading. It was wonderful. Four of my besties and me alone, hanging on to Bill. He was polite and unconcerned by what  for me spoke to the general state of the gay male industrial complex--that it routinely sacrificed its most hard-won gifts for tawdry emotional appeal, in art, in literature, and most obviously in music. Of course this is true of another kind of 99%, right, the regular ol' world, the other 1% of us having been "blessed" with no discernibly useful talents except for making art. But Burroughs brought something real to the table. While the queers were buying poppers and jack mags--and why not!?--Jane and Paul Bowles, Verlaine, Barnes and Proust were getting thumbed by yours truly, who would then "sell" them back to the bookstore as "used." Oh, there's another financial amend I owe. Fantastic.

Burroughs didn't seem to need gay approbation, and why would he? He wasn't Lambda Rising Gay, then a mixture of 70's clone (hoodie in jean jacket, moustache, aviators )--he was his own thing--but my favorite part of meeting him was when he sent down his Aryan amanuensis James to ask "if it was okay if Bill took some magazines home." And sure enough, when they left, Burroughs carried a paper sack stacked with Numbers, Inches, Colt, and Honcho that I had packed up for him myself, secretly dreaming an unseen dream of being someone, something, that William Burroughs might jack off to.

Maybe we didn't shoot our wads together, but possibly that night, William and I might have shot other things, in hotel rooms, basements, rest rooms. I met him again with John Waters. I would never want to be the man John Waters would jack to, but I admire him just the same. They both articulate the life of men who cannot be anything other than themselves. Iconoclasts. Heroin had Burroughs. It was a love affair that lasted his entire life. What heroin, addiction in general is to me, is a way of grinding myself to my body. I haven't tasted dope since 1993 but I know its smell, I can conjure it any time. I want to curl up behind Burroughs, my thick torso and gloppy belly smashed against his sticky bones, the filo dough of old man skin wrapped around a skeleton. Poppies in your ear man. Burroughs left poppies in my ear.

HE'S BAAAACK! (putting the "ack" into...well, you get the picture)

Gosh it's been a long time! See, you didn't know I had incorporated "gosh" into my vocab it's been that long. Well there you go. I've used this site to document my experiences on testosterone as I changed, paying some attention to the delicious physical outpourings of hair growth (ok, more like weed growth in an abandoned construction site), sexual VIGOR, Rowrr!, but really so much more interested in what was happening to my BRAINS.

Ye Gods. The brains. Please plunder the goods here; there's a lot of writing and whining and OCTOPUSES and also some moments of divine intervention. Not my doing. Think of me sitting on a cat-clawed comfy chair wearing my girlfriend's striped calf-length long johns, laptop atop two pillows, clacking away on my toast-crumb ridden keyboard when all of the sudden...

The GREAT SHE KRAKEN. "YOU'RE WEARING THOSE HORRIBLE LONG JOHNS AGAIN"
yes, I say meekly. SIGH.

And now this is reading like a Terry Pratchett novel.

I've reemerged from the briny deep to report that while terrible things are happening to the planet, and humans seem desperately resistant to changing the way they see things, other things are happening too. There are creative, mischievous, passionate forces at work here Dollface, and they might be coming out of YOU. Things are going to look very different tomorrow, and transgender is having an enormous impact, holding hands with queer while extending tentacles and eye-stalks in divergent directions.

Just this week I read about body-mod folks implanting magnets in their fingers as the next step towards cyborg. They're able to sense microwaves, and hold pictures to fridges. Called "body hacking", it may seem frivolous, it is absolutely a foray into the margins, the liminal space of the what-else. And it's in this space we'll find where we're going to live, shaping our bodybeings into configurations that connect with whatever landscape we emerge from.

I read about a woman who inseminates sea corals, suggesting that this dying ecosystem may no longer live in the ocean, but will continue in aquariums or other spaces. I saw that a friend of mine, who has been working with a team to create chemotherapies that denote only when they reach the cancer, has been having some great success in trials.

I myself just repurposed  a table, some pegboard, and some wood, retrofitting my shed and my studio with new old objects, not the stuff of cancer research perhaps but environmentally awesome plus points for making furniture. Retrofitting old stuff is kind of like transitioning...

These are hopeful moments. These are NOW moments, not just future hopeful moments. The GREAT SHE KRAKEN recedes now--my own work is with my body and pain, juddering synapses and hyperalgesia, the ongoing evolution of sensation. I'm convinced we're moving towards an embodied sentience, like the octopus, which shares neuro-optical brain heirarchies with humans. They "think" with their bodies. I imagine this is what my hyperpain sensitivity is doing in me, extending a knowing into worldings. But it hurts.

Enough out of me. For NOW.
LOVE,
Sam.

Knights of the Iguana

In the abstract, transgender men having babies seems a little like having cake with your frosting and eating it too, if only because transitioning itself is already like making a really big baby. To carry a child in this baby seems rather like an infant carrying a fetus, if you can follow my logic. But of course, in reality, this is the most mundane phenomenon of all – pregnancy. Yawn. I know more people these past 9 months – trans or not - who have had babies and I know a shocking number of currently pregnant people as well. Since I’ve lost several friends this year, this must be the Imax 3-D summer of the whole life-death cycle thingum. It seems rather extravagantly generative and almost oppressively Spring-ish however, like, having concluded we are indeed careening towards the Endtimes, the seasons are throwing themselves a White Party on Fire Island with Marianne the Maenad.

What I had not anticipated by transitioning was becoming an entirely new person. The narrative of transgender is that we get to be “who we really are.” I held to the string of that flighty balloon – the bladder of Becoming More Deeply Oneself – and looked to it to lead me somewheres. Where is a balloon going to take you but to the troposphere where you shall surely get sucked into the jets of a Southwest 757? Transitioning did not free me to find myself, like a divorce or a week with Outward Bound – it put me in a genetic splicing machine like The Fly and created something new, wondrous, horrible, as humdrum as pregnancy. I can tell you I am not more purely myself; I am something new entirely. As with a child, I can taste the flavor of my parents in everything I do but my parents are the boychild and grownuplady Sam. And they have about the amount of control and impact on me as Ward and June did on Eddie Haskell. 

Snakes and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, hormones and name change and chest reconstructions – these are what little boys are made of. Are you still finding your voice? Do you know who you are? As a transwoman, as an ftm? My condition (Gender identity disorder? U.S. artist?) means I shall ever be standing next to myself, observing, critiquing, wincing. I meet people of many persuasions who at least appear to be inside their own skins, but if I asked them I suspect I would learn they are a potato twice baked and terrified of being eaten. I myself feel rather underdone…but I’m closer now to something…

Disorder doesn’t touch it. I am nothing but order. My orders come in magnetic waves, a magnet wand moving iron shavings around a face – look, a Van Dyke beard! Now a Fu Manchu! I’m at the mercy of the magnet, people, I’m Wooly Willy. Only I wish I had that kind of facial hair. Transitioning is in the hands of people best suited for Etch-A-Sketch, Wooly Willy, Mr.Potato Head, our childhood selves who are imagining our adult beings. When I was six I used to roll up my pants legs and pretend to be a “Gridiron hero.” I didn’t exactly know what the “gridiron” was but its masculine significance captivated me. I confess, I rarely watch sports of any kind, and as I’ve grown older the sort of masculinity attached to the NFL has little appeal. I pine for the lace-up knee pants of yore, with leather armor and an actual pigskin.

So my boychild infects the adult. I make a fetish of ties and cufflinks and if it didn’t smell so much I might VO5 my hair like my father did. The man I’m becoming, and when I say “man” I mean quotey-hands man, is an amalgam of testosterone, surgery, and Bobby the camp counselor when I was nine. My library of manlitude is one ludicrous and scratchy reel after another – my godfather Gary Belt and his amazing, perfectly tanned, Mark Spitz-type body, or Mark Spitz himself, with that flagrant seventies soup-catcher and excellent bangs. Let us neither mention nor forget the Speedo, come to that. Stuffed with nuts, a banana hammock – stars and stripes forever, Ma! It was treacherous, to linger too long there; the effect of a man’s package on my pre-teen brain might have been enough to expose my inner longing, but alas I had no tongue (!) for it and I dared not give it name.

Today, who are we? We mutants, who has created us? If I were a woman I would be Ava Gardner in Iguana, Ingrid Bergman from Notorious, Butterfield 8 era Liz, Nico, Violette Leduc, Gerty Stein – but I’m not, so I won’t. Once upon a time, when I was a lesbian, I hosted a “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Party” and wore stilettos and a silk slip to my suite at the Plaza Hotel and left bright red lipstick on everything. My head pounded with red wine and Percocet because I knew the truth even then: I was Big Daddy in drag. 

So from the head of our childhoods we issue, now Yul Brynner, now Speed Racer. What gets mashed in these templates is up to your cocktail of choice: estrogens, testosterones, accessories, plumage, fiberglass hulls, pantyhose, tricorn hats, or powdered hoof. We think we get a choice – and perhaps in some karmic, celestial way we do – but in the here-and-now, Baby, you’re lucky if you’re more Willy Aames than aimless willy. Surrender Dorothy, to the amalgamated tramp art of transition, all hand-madey and hobo, slapped between slabs of neutered silicon and stitches. Be grateful you are less of your own choosing; let the magic fingers (a quarter a pop!) of JesusMaryandJosephlizard massage your cortex into a gendered submission. The gods are going to have their way with you, trust. Please, my sisterbrother, should you see me senescent and ambling down your garden path, know that I have become most truly myself - ineffably, righteously, magnificently me. And I will be wearing a pair of red, white, and stretched out blue speedos.

The Incredibly Shallow Birdbath of Loneliness

Lesbians.

Lesbians are complicated. Rather, my relationship with lesbians is complicated. My relationship to lesbianism is complicated. People in AA occasionally say, “it’s Alcohol-ISM, not Alcohol-WASM,” after which I always mutter “it’s Lesbian-ISM, not Lesbian-WASM!”

Is it Lesbian ISM or WASM for me? My friend (and favorite painter) Ed Larson ran into me and my new paramour on the durty streets of downtown Chapel Hill. He turned to his wife, afterwards and said “So Sam is a MAN, and he’s dating a LESBIAN?” Jessica prudently shushed him with a “just don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about it.”

I don’t know that my friend identifies as “lesbian.” This is more of a Queer dimension we inhabit. But for sure, the uninformed and unimaginative will certainly read us as two dykes. And Ed was only partly kidding – the bafflement exists. For many of us, Queer an’all, who is with whom can be perplexing. Just ask my friend S, whose daughter is now her son, who now identifies as “heterosexual.” S can’t wrap her brain around her son’s sexual declaim, largely I think because she knows what’s in her “son’s” pants. It simply doesn’t make commonsense to her.

I was raised by perverts, once I left home. In PervLand everything exists simultaneously. You’re a puppy, perhaps, maybe even neutered. By day you’re a banker, but you keep your bowl in your bottom drawer, your secret “real” life anchoring you to emotional security like Linus’ blanket. For some, trans is a paraphilia. What do I have in common with the guy who wears a skirt, has boobs, but still identifies as a guy and for whom these are sexual talisman, turn-ons? His perv trip is way out loud. Transitioning has its psychosexual elements; to find one’s way home can contain the fiercest surge, the sweetest charge. I learned to be comfortable, or at least amused, with sex and gender nuance, is what I’m saying to you.

Lesbian was always rather more challenging for me. I was uncomfortable around the lesbians from the git. My homophobia seized on the Mary McCarthy “The Group” paradigm of lesbianism, which was that it was inbred, incestuous, riddled with unappealing drama, rife with poor boundaries and busy-body-ness, obsessive, unattractive. The first lesbians I knew were these two characters from High School. They were absolutely insane. One of them, a hide-tough, prematurely leathered blonde wanted to borrow a syringe we kept in my house for my brother’s allergy medicine, because she wanted to try shooting cocaine; the other, a less hardened, cheerleader blonde had literally fucked the entire football team. They terrified me.

They were lesbianism pathologized. I was 15 and out by then myself, at least to my friends, and drinking beer at their party. The blond, coke-shooting scary one passed me a nearly depleted bottle of tequila, and in what appeared to my ingenuous ears as a gesture of lesbian bonhomie, said “Here, drink up, Sam! Go’head, finish this shit!”

From across the room, as time inverted, I saw the buxom blonde’s head snap. Immediately she appeared between us, and wrapped her hand around the bottle. “Isn’t that the tequila that made us really, really sick?” she asked her generous partner. “Oh right” smirked Leathern, who turned her gaze full on me, with a face full of glory and hate.

In general, women terrified me. This persisted until my forties I’d say, when I finally sank into the warm, inviting waters of me and my own sexual power without needing another’s validation or invitation. It is no coincidence that at this time I discovered my need to explore my nascent masculinity. Or whatever you want to call it.

Can I ever fully relinquish my Lesbo card? Is it ISM? I have always felt like a fraud around lesbians, but is that simply a metastasized outcropping of my alcoholism, which is always finding ways to isolate me, keep me from connecting? Or am I a fraud because I’m actually NOT A LESBIAN?

Feeling fraudulent would explain my discomfort, my homophobia, my occasional nausea. It feels like a club I never fully fit in, yet another social sphere that seems to have implicit rules, behaviors, dress-codes and handshakes, possibly its own language, and I will never, ever be given that manual, led by the Lesbian Illuminati to the inner-sanctum, a labial labyrinth where women actually do run the planet, like the Jews control the media.

For now, I’m a straight dude and a dyke, who is neither terribly straight, nor totally dude, nor really a dyke. I guess I’ll float around Queerville for a while; these are my people, the outliers, the fetishists, the sublimely ridiculous, the ones who own costumes because they sometimes just feel like being an old lady from Weehawken, whose politics are interstitial and connective, who are the literal fluid between social cells, and who fear unlovability even in the face of astounding love and compassion.

Queers and octopuses. Did I mention the octopuses? At the end of the day, we’re all the freaking same, even with eight legs and a huge head. It’s human ISM, not human WASM.

Fire, Walk With Me and While You're Here Could You Get Me Some Ice-Cream?

I just got off the phone with one of my fellow spirit-travelers, Kat Nas, who was preparing her fire-walking workshop in Long Island. She’s going to take a gang of New York men and women and show them how to break arrows in half by jamming them point-wise into their own necks. She’s very brave, that one. Kat and I used to do the S/m circuit in Manhattan; it’s what many of us stumbled into on our search for expansion into freedom and bliss. Now she workshops fire, and I stick myself with hormones. I jest, sort of; my freedom and bliss, my dive into sublime Consciousness continues organically, and my body is like a crystal in a kaleidoscope, rearranging into newer, sometimes just different, glorious calls of love to my creator.

I know, don’t gag. I really feel like that though, like I’m fractally imploding into Love…I’m typing this and I looked up at this Klee print I have and it started expanding and moving with my third eye. That’s just how it is for me. Shut the fuck up. Get your own print if you don’t believe me.

Two weeks ago, I was deeply concerned about the shape of my body. Dysmorphia plagued me. I was a dolphin trapped in a tuna net. These breasts, these thighs, this overall inclination to a certain, dare I say, Zaftig physiognomy? Oh this female fat threatened to smuffocate me, headlock me with larded thighs; I was half-nelsoned with swinging underarm ladyfat, choking on a mouthful of Secret, bitch-slapped by two mammoth teats. Could this really be my body? How could I possibly go on, much less leave my room, if this was the form I took?

This was a whole ‘nother level in self-loathing. Of course, dysmorphia is an American illness. How am I different from someone who has come to believe they cannot have love with their current nose, cannot find a job without a more substantive bosom, cannot go on one more day with this wretched body, this betrayer, this Thing – what did I ever do to deserve this Thing?!

Yes, arguably the transgendered host their own insidious breed of discomfort, and perhaps it is righteous even. But I’m old, and I want peace.

The fire-walker learns to transcend, not pain, but space/time. The universe will accommodate this, is what I’m told. The fire-walker, the one who rends arrows on her neck, is the one who has transmuted her terror into joy, who has shifted energetically into a state of willingness to meet some goal. This is my goal: to walk twenty feet on burning coals. This is my brain: how the fuck am I going to walk on fucking coals without scorching my fucking feets!? How am I going to be a Sam-man if I’m blanketed with delicious womanly lady-lumpage? How the fuckity fuck!???

Transmute the terror into joy.

Well that’s easy for you to say, Tranny, is what I believe you’ll be muttering. Let me tell you what happened, allow me to guide you on my coal-walk…

Chapter One: Whereupon our lad reaches for his whaling knife, to scrape the blubber from the mammal’s skin.

I had a thought. It looked like this: if I could control my food, if I could diet, if I could drop twenty pounds, I’d have NO TITS. Because it’s true; I wouldn’t. I’ve been skinny, and I can tell you empirically “I have no tits.” I would have no mams, and no hips. Easy peasey. When you’re on crystal meth!

Chapter Two: Our hapless hero is daunted by this Sisyphean task, and so regroups for a more...economical solution.

I realized, no matter what I did, how I “controlled” any bit of my body, there would always be something. I was never going to have peace with this Thing. That’s a stunning piece of information, that’s very useful. It means I need to make some peace, find a place of ease in this…me…this corporeal construct.

JL said to me “You’re on a journey. I used to think ‘when I lose this 10 pounds, when I get this job, when I have this money’ in some future I would be happy. But you’re where you’re at right now, and in this moment you can’t change that. Be happy for Sam! He’s changing, every day! Be sweet with this person!”

I didn’t throw up in my mouth. You can hear certain things from certain people. JL is one of them.

I’m standing on the coals but I don’t feel them now. I can’t make the world “see me for who I am” – when do we ever see one another for who we are, except by intimacy or by accident? I have to love this little Sam who is on this scary, wondrous journey, who likes the wind and the tumult yet wishes it weren’t so tempting to hide beneath the bed.

This body, it’s a body. It does wonderful things – it makes all kinds of pleasure, and noises which I like, and movements, although last week it threw up out of its butt. I love this body. If it loses weight, cool, that’s awesome. Two less things to worry about. Perhaps. If it doesn’t, I’m still me, still making toast of the soles of my dogs, watching and laughing aloud because there’s no meat sizzle, no blistering, and you’re still holding my hand, which means we’re both standing in the middle of a motherfucking fire, yo, and look, look what’s happening right now. We just alchemically transmuted pain into joy.

The Things She Does to Please

I keep remembering the weekend I spent shooting dope with Nico. Even 200+ pounds, with every last bit of health having long fled the pogrom of her junky mouth, leaving only corpse teeth and rotting stumps, Nico was still about eight feet of striking Teutonic Presence. Those cheekbones and that voice, almost sepulchral – both those bones and that voice would seize in your chest, catch you up like a sudden temperature drop.

Her caftan kept catching on her track mark scabs, which looked to me like sutures, stitched and black, and she kept a constant Budweiser in her enormous German paw. I found it baffling, upsetting even, that she would drink such a shitty American beer. I only drank Molsen at the time, typically purloined from whatever bar we were performing at. One can afford snobbery when one is a thief.

We were doing a Velvet Underground cover-band that night, opening for Nico. I “played” her, and sang “I’ll be your mirror” in sheer panic as my idol appeared to listen, with majestic tilt to her entire body. Afterwards she drawled “I haaate that song” to my apologetic (apoplectic) genuflection.

Several years before this zenith in my junked out rock-n-roll debacle, I had decided to at least physically emulate a Factory-era Nico. I loved the VU, but more specifically I was in awe of the boys in my life, all of who loved VU. At eighteen I’d cropped my unkempt seventies, no-frills, parted-down-the-middle hippie hair into sixties long, sharp bangs. I’d considered doing the whole white lipstick, white boots schtick; I couldn’t have come up with this on my own. At the urging of my boy friends I imagined morphing into this iconic, nearly abstract, monolith of all things powerful and female, German mystery, a ship’s prow, the seduction of Jim Morrison, Alain Delon, a nearly pedophilic relationship with a baby Jackson Browne. When it came to totemic femininity I had less than nothing, and so was eager to sell myself out to the wet dreams of (other) young men, men who evidently thought I could do a reasonable Nico.

But at the end of the day, I resented being told I looked like her, or like Chrissie Hynde whom I was now beginning to resemble with my black hair and bangs and excessive eyeliner. Truly I think I more closely resembled Robert Smith, but no-one said that to my face.

I cast about, sometimes frantically for a moment at least, for some model, some woman I might be. (My mother was about the least feminine woman I knew, occasionally needing Father’s aide to dress herself – she had an unfortunate predilection for vivid pinks and bright oranges.) My girlfriends seemed to have some birthright access to a sense of feminine style – even if it was androgynous they would rock that like Annie Lennox. There were hairstyles and skin care, boots and blouses; there was foundation and blush and powder and brow-liners, marching and replicating like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and there I was like Mickey, turning and double-taking and dropping things and tripping and falling, terrified I would get caught, be found out. Femininity was like an episode of Fear Factor, whereupon I was forced to endure powders and unguents, busy well-intentioned workwoman hands with sponges and brushes clogging every pore, blanketing my skin, my being, until I was choking, choking…

I managed. I found my niche. The eighties were a wonderful place to roam the labyrinth of Maybelline – makeup could be extreme, Kabuki, and men were wearing it too. You find your way, you make your peace, although when you’re a big dyke, gay men and pretty women feel obliged, eager even, to corner you into a makeover.

Like Nico, I eventually found my way to methadone. Unlike Nico, this enabled me to survive ten more years until I could start to find recovery. She died, I believe, after riding her bike on a beach, her body ill-equipped after years of destruction, to handle her new-found lust for life.

I’m lucky I got to be raised a woman, even though I feel like Mowgli in “The Jungle Book” sometimes: having learned the harsh and beautiful ways and laws of the natural world I now must walk amongst “civilized” men with little idea how to do so.

Having often felt I was doing a piss-poor job of being a woman, I now of course fear the same as a man. But this just makes me human, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not your expression of gender that you “fail” at – maybe it’s being a parent, or a friend, or someone your age. These constructs are all just ideas – they’re not even real, and yet they sometimes trap me like that paralytic moment between dreams and awakening, where I panic because I can’t raise my eyelid and things are encroaching in the shadowy periphery, sleep threatening to gulp me down again.

But we will wake up; we always do right?

Look What the Cat Dragged In or A Scientific Chin Wag

Some cat owners don’t neuter their toms until after a certain amount of puberty. They like the fullness of the cheeks, the fat face toms will develop if left testicled for a time.* I swear I am getting this face. My face is thicker, down where it meets my neck. I’ve been hitting the gym hard and my neck and shoulders are thickening…so is this fatty face a result of that, or is it testosterone? Certainly my capacity to lift more is T – I’d pretty much maxed out my ability there as a 47 year old perimenopausal CHICK, much to my chagrin. It was really depressing, that I couldn’t pound more iron without hurting myself.

I spent my evening with two scientist friends, who wanted “scientific information, dispassionately.” “Tell me what’s changing! Do you drink milk straight from the fridge!?” Duh. I don’t even mop that shit up when it hits the floor, much less my greasy shirt.

I offer my chin for tactile inspection. “I don’t feel anything” states Mattie. “You’re totally emasculating me Dude!” I pout. This is the thing: people ask for evidence and when you give it to them they’re routinely disappointed. They want, even more than I do I suspect, a full beard, a merkin. I proffer my (fat) chin again. “Look” I say. Hadley, attempting diplomacy, says “oh yeah, I see! Is that more than before?” because we lived together and she knows I was a bewhiskered woman. Kee-RYST. This is what I get for presenting myself as a human freak show. Nonetheless, the changes are there. They’re both subtle, and immense.

For most transguys, the evolution generated by imposed hormones come too slow. K says “I wanted sideburns! I was fixated on sideburns!” I am amazed that after 3 months, there are differences at all, and while they may not present themselves to others, to me they are stunning and significant. Imagine you are sitting on the toilet, and you look down and realize there are hairs on your legs that weren’t there a week ago. Fancy that you are in your car, playing that last Shins album and you can no longer hit the high notes. In a matter of weeks. My voice cracks crazy when I’m singing; I’ll sing high just to hear it and cry myself out of hysterical laughter. In a matter of weeks. Hormones are a powerful, powerful thing.

I cried yesterday. I needed to, and hadn’t been able. There’s a plunge, days before my dose, that dips me into an old depression so deep I cannot tap an outlet. An hour after I shoved that needle into my leg I wept and wept and wept. So much for stereotypes.

*"left testicled for a time" Isn't that DELICIOUS!?