False Start

Excerpt of a false start to my transgender cowboy memoir. Don't mind the mismatched tenses.

In my mind I am in Miami. Lifting foam from the swirling tides, the moon shifts and constellates the waves that collapse on shore like a prayer, then fall apart again: the sea itself buried in the sand. Lightning bugs glow, like slow-motion twinkles of blinking stars. Here, the sky and the sea are colored the same, and when the sunset settles its smoky pastels the air swells so humid I am almost the same as the sea.

In magic, there are only ugly secrets. Light and shadow are what conceal the thread. A beautiful secret will be whispered again in another's ear. But you'd rather be fooled; you're not really looking for the answer. Because the only secret of magic is that it is hiding in plain sight.

When I moved to Richmond, I felt like a time traveler. I had spent the better part of the last decade without electricity, hitchhiking and working as a cowboy. My world had been different shades of leather, and all the sudden colors in a city so full of murals seemed neon.

I'd moved to Virginia once before, and swore I'd never do it again. I'd arrived in Dillwyn in December 2012, the day the world ended, after driving three days straight with an Apache man who said he danced the sun. I tried to make myself love a woman who named herself after an owl and lured me with a copy of The Four-Chambered Heart but instead I paid $500 for a Corolla with farm use plates and floorboards a foot could punch a hole through, drove all night to NYC and fell in love for real the first time with a redhaired Southern girl with a last name first name that loved Chicken Divine. Tell me again Virginia is for lovers.

I don't know why I looked. I knew you had a boyfriend, though your wife didn't. I was in on the secret, I thought. Then I realized I was the secret.

***

My miracle babies, my sister will call my sister and me. In her own body she had shaped and formed five tiny ones before, only to lose them. She'll pray and beg every day, cry and cajole and scream for twins until she reads Psalm 113:9 and then she'll claim that every day and thank God for twins every day and every day know it was always-already hers. Four days before the first ultrasound, the pastor's wife will come down from the platform to prophesy she'll have two twins. A boy and a girl, she knows, but her mother will insist on buying only girls' clothes. Everyone will say she grew a belly bigger than a whale. Standing on God's word and thanking God until you know you believe works, she'll say, though her mother's an atheist.

***

The psychic pulled the Eight of Swords: a person bound-up and blindfolded, surrounded by swords. She told me what would happen and I didn't believe her. A year since your boyfriend and I wrestled on your lawn. I had cried to Miss Cat and she told me to write a prayer inside a tealight, burn a letter in the flame and fold the ashes into a packet with herbs and mail it in a hollow tree and so I did. On the next full moon, a text out of nowhere, a secret app under your work name: It said you joined Signal and I couldn't delete the notification and I felt something pulling on the red thread, you said. I believed in the moon but still I thought it a coincidence. Magic must just be all in my head. Your head is just a hell of a lot bigger than you think, she said.

We'd met on a bench by the canal at night and when the train went by we both went silent while it roared like the ocean waves. In my mind I'd said sorry so many times so many ways I didn't have anything left to say because it was like I said it already. Before I really said anything, you said I love you like I knew you would, and I think about you every day and I did too. I've never been so hung up on someone. But I was the one on the meathook. I can't date anyone else, but you already were. He's a wonderful partner, and you said wonderful again, like I wasn't the one  you were trying to convince. 

***

My father will be dead set on naming us Disney and Daphne so that he can call us Dizzy and Daffy, like some kind of ducks. My parents won't be allowed to leave until they give us names so three days later my father will relent. Hayley and Heather, to match the Hunt. I was named after an actress nobody remembers, and my sister a flower. My mother will want to name the boy Holden: hold, like both the hollow and heald do sheep. 

Rumplestiltskin can tell you: there's power in a name. Isis made from Ra's own spit a snake to bite him, so that she could know the name he had hidden in his body. He knows it's not fire nor water, but the snake slithers away unseen. The poison leaves a man when his name is pronounced, said Isis, and when it leaves his body so does the poison.

As a kid I'll scoot around in my too-big cowboy boots my father's friend from AA gave me, and run along the ridgeline of the couch playing "Cowboys & Indians," hooting and shooting my cap gun at the sun. When my mother is 39 she'll walk in again on my dad masturbating in the bathroom. He'll say he loves her and he means it, but only in that minute, and then she'll read pulp romance while he goes on another camping trip with Barb who he drives home from AA.

She'll dream the neighbor's husband is having an affair and when she tells her they stop talking but when she finally files for divorce she has to hire a private detective to find my father and get his signature. She'll tell me later how he held a gun at us while she held me but each time the story changes and when I'm in rehab the first time as a teenager my dad will say my memory of him shooting my frog on the sidewalk was all a dream.

***

You used to look at me and I'd say "What?" and you'd say "Just lookin'," and bite your thumb. I said I couldn't do it anymore so you flew me in. You said you wanted me to see you in your element, and I wanted to see you see me look. The front door said NO BOYFRIENDS ALLOWED but I was your secret so you snuck me in. Sharpening your stilettos with chalk for a cue, you said, "You are everything I want." That stage is still inside my skull: from its pole your legs branch, and for a moment you hang before you slip from your ripe skin and burst open on stage.

***

You always said I made up stories in my head, made self-fulfilling prophecies. I wanted honesty, and you. If only I could write a different story, I thought. I wondered what it would be like if we met in person instead, wished you would forget what I looked like, wished I could change my name and do it all over again.

Miss Cat said she's a writer. Said her mom dated Henry Miller and that I couldn't say sorry but I could write a book. I was impatient. If only I could write you a letter, if I could say the right thing – as if there was a magic word I could find that would reverse everything – I could finally make you understand. Don't you see? I thought. You said he said he loved you and I asked if you did too. Time doesn't go in that direction, you said.

***

Miami was all flamingos and fucking and fevers, a flimsiness to every salt-crusted facade, the painted brick building muralled with pink birds staring at us staring straight ahead, you slipping my fingers under your dress in the back of the cab. A fever dream but I was fevered for real; then it was soaking sheets through while I wondered in my fever if the flamingos were ever there.

*** 

"Hole in the wall" is what Kadoka means. Some call it a gateway. That side of the smooth badlands the cold can barrel like a spirit across the flat hills. In Kadoka, South Dakota, the Dakota Inn is the only motel. They'll say the wind is what dried up the pool, but folks there hardly ever seen anything ever full. 

In the lobby, Jerry is proud of his tea-colored Folgers, the only kind you'll find there. He'll pay me to paint over the peeling buffalo on the side of the building, and to cover sticky stains of yellowed nicotine with KILZ in the room of the man before me. His ghost still lives there, along with a wire shelf weighed down by commodity cheese. Without thinner, I'll wash my brush in gasoline.

At night, John Lyle and I will drive in the dark delivering parts for his cousin on snow packed-down dirty highways. Third transmission, but she still pulls. He'll say winter before last the snow piled on so fast every horse and heifer drowned. We'll drive with the dome light on in the dark and he'll sing me Bobby Bare, say he used to play backup for Buck Owens and they'd perform in Nudie suits and honky tonk all around while he had women always chasing him down. I hand him a CD called "Lullabyes, Legends and Lies" and when "Marie Laveau" comes on he changes the words to "Bil-ly Laveau, you lovely witch, a give me little charm that'll make me rich. Gimme million dollars and tell ya what I'll do… this very night, I'm gonna marry you!" and then he laughs high-pitched til he's coughing up asbestos again. "I'd run away with you," he says.

***

Continued…