Michael Tolliver Lives (17 page)

“Connor’s totally hot for him.”

“Hot for him in real life? Or just hot for his movies?”

“His movies,” said Jake, sounding a little testy.

I just didn’t get it. If Jake, an FTM himself, had a thing for a guy who liked FTM porn stars, what the hell was the problem? It looked like smooth sailing to me.

“Help me out here,” I said.

Jake sighed and looked up from his dangling hands. “He’s real proud of his pussy, you know.”

“Connor?”

“No…doofus. Buck Angel.”

“Okay…thanks…keep going.”

“He calls himself ‘a real man with a real pussy.’ It’s part of his whole macho image. He flaunts it.”

The light began to dawn. I remembered the night Jake and I hooked up at the Lone Star and how utterly alienated he had seemed from the plumbing he was born with. “Don’t worry,” he’d said. “I’ll keep my pants on. I don’t like that thing any more than you do.” But Connor, apparently, was attracted to Buck Angel, at least in part,
because
of his vagina and the immense pride he took in it. And there, as they say, was the rub.

“So Connor…” I began.

“…wants to fuck me,” said Jake.

“Okay.”

“No…it’s not okay. I don’t wanna get fucked.” Jake gave me a bleak little smile. “At least not
there
.”

“Gotcha.”

“What should I do, boss?”

“Have another éclair,” I said.

I could hardly wait to get home that night to Google Buck Angel. I found a video clip that featured him in a witty scene at a laundromat. He was buff and tattooed, a completely convincing biker dude with a shaved head and a red mustache, and he was slowly feeding his clothes to a washing machine while a trio of beautiful women ogled him delightedly. When he was totally naked, he sat down to read a newspaper, so the women leaned closer to catch a glimpse of what lay beneath. It was a vagina all right.

I was cruising a gallery of still photos when Ben ambled into the office with a mug of tea and looked at the screen. “Is that him?” he asked, leaning forward.

“That’s him.”

“Fuck. Look at his pecs.”

“I know. And check out the ass. He’s got those little dents like you do.”

“Is there a frontal shot?”

“Oh, yeah.” I found it for him.

“Jesus.”

“Shaved and everything,” I said.

“You know what?” said Ben. “That’s fucking hot.”

I shot him a look.

“I’m serious.”

“I can see that.”

“It’s a little…unsettling, but…under the right circumstances…”

“I swear,” I muttered. “You young people today.”

I was joking, but not really. The world is changing way too fast for me with its Podcasts and pregnant strippers and macho manginas. No sooner have I mastered one set of directions than another comes along to replace it. It’s getting harder and harder to keep up with what’s going down. My only solace lies in something Anna once told me:

“You don’t have to keep up, dear. You just have to keep open.”

I saw Anna two days later, when the weekend rolled around. I picked her up at the apartment and drove her to the SPCA on Sixteenth Street in search of the cat she wanted. The adoption center there is a well-designed modern facility that’s considered a model for the rest of the country. It’s what they call a “no kill” shelter, where animals are guaranteed a home until they’re adopted. The dogs live on “Lassie Lane,” each in his own sunny private apartment. They have couches, potted plants, and TVs playing cat videos. The cats have a separate “condo” facility, complete with aquariums and picture windows, so they can stare at the birds outside. I went there once between marriages, five or six years ago, thinking that a pet might make a decent stand-in for a husband. As I wandered the halls, peering through doors at recumbent wretches with longing in their eyes, I might have been back at the Ritch Street Baths, where love (or at least a warm body) was potentially waiting around the corner.

You just had to keep looking.

“Where do these kitties come from?” Anna was standing in one of the cat condos, stroking a handsome longhaired domestic on a perch.

“From Animal Control, I think. They find the ones that are adoptable.”

“What about the unadoptable?”

I shrugged. “I guess they don’t make it here.”

“Where is Animal Control?” she asked.

It was barely a block away, so we were there in a matter of minutes. This was a city-run operation, the front line of animal rescue, and the difference was palpable. The rooms were more like cells than condos, and some of the animals were howling in panic and confusion. “This is more like it,” said Anna, surveying the scene.

She found a small black cat she liked: a timid war-torn creature with a notch in its ear. A sturdy lesbian staffer let us into the room, where Anna sat in a folding chair and waited for the cat to approach her. It took a while, but it happened. The cat rubbed against Anna’s leg, emitting a feeble throaty noise that was closer to “ack” than “meow.” Satisfied, it sprang into her velvet lap and curled up to the size of a dinner plate.

“She fits,” said Anna, smiling at the staffer.

“We call her Squeaker,” the staffer said. “For obvious reasons.”

Anna nodded.

“You could name her what you want, of course.”

Anna rubbed the cat’s chin with her forefinger.

“She’s older than the others,” the staffer added. “Will that be a problem?”

“It hasn’t been for me,” said Anna.

She looked up at me warmly. “Let’s take her home.”

By the time we’d arrived at Anna’s apartment, heavily laden with pet paraphernalia, she had already named the cat Ninotchka. She’d first seen the film as a gender-confused nineteen-year-old and since then had nursed a serious thing for Garbo. “We can call her Notch for short,” she said, “after her most distinctive feature.”

We didn’t call her
anything
for a while, since she crawled under Anna’s ancestral oak armoire and refused to come out. All that remained of her was a tiny disembodied voice going “ack” from time to time, like a cricket stranded in the woodwork.

“She’s just getting her bearings,” Anna said blithely as she poured me a glass of sherry at the kitchen table. Her hand, I noticed, was shaking a little.

“Can I help with that?” I asked.

“What’s the matter? Afraid I’ll spill on you?”

I smiled at her as she poured her own drink.

“A toast to Ninotchka,” she said, lifting her glass.

I clinked my glass against hers. “Wherever she may be.”

“And listen to me, dear: If I die before she does, she’s not to go back to the shelter.”

I admit I was rattled by that. “Well, “I said, “aren’t we melodramatic this afternoon?”

“It’s a practical consideration, dear. Don’t be silly. You just never know.”

No, you don’t, do you?
I was thinking of dear, departed Harry, the poodle I thought would surely survive me. Or other positive guys who maxed out their credit cards, counting on death to cut them a deal, but ending up broke and alive. Not to mention the virus-free friends who’ve recently dropped dead of heart attacks. The end can come—or not come—to anyone at anytime, and no one knew that better than Anna. Her mother had died at ninety-something, still running a brothel in Nevada; her daughter hadn’t made it far past fifty. Assumptions of
any
kind are a luxury we can’t afford.

“All right,” I said. “If that happens…we’ll take her.”

She patted my hand in gratitude.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “I’m sure we’ve got
something
she can live under.”

Anna glanced toward the armoire. “Careful, dear. She can hear you.”

Around twilight Jake showed up, letting himself into Anna’s flat with the key she had given him. He’d brought her a bag of persimmons from the Farmers Market and a ridiculously large block of toilet paper from CostCo. He stayed for a few minutes in hopes of meeting Ninotchka, but the cat, not unlike Garbo herself, wanted to be alone.

When Jake headed back to his own flat, Anna turned to me with a gleam in her eye that I’d come to recognize over the years. “He’s seeing someone, you know.”

“I know,” I said evenly.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, reading my expression.

I explained—perhaps a little too delicately, considering the audience—that Jake was not as comfortable with his “birth genitals” as his boyfriend wanted him to be.

“I thought his boyfriend was gay,” said Anna.

“He is. And he relates to Jake as a guy. He just likes the idea of…”

“A vagina,” said Anna. “You can say it, dear.”

Anna had become too much of a parent for me to discuss this issue with any degree of nonchalance. “Jake says he can’t relate to his vagina, that it’s basically…a foreign object to him. To use it having sex with his boyfriend would be like…denying his essential masculinity. If you follow me.” I smiled at her helplessly. “
Are
you following me?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Was it like that for you?”

“Like what, dear?”

“Did you feel that way about your penis?”

“Well,” said Anna, widening her eyes above the rim of her sherry glass, “let’s just say I wasn’t especially attached to it.”

I smiled, relieved that she’d lightened the moment.

“You know, dear, some kids today are perfectly content to do without the surgery. They figure that gender is mostly in the head anyway, so why tamper with the parts that are specifically designed for pleasure? Why not let your head have the last word and leave your groin to enjoy itself? That way…if you were born female, say, like Jake…you don’t end up with…you know…some unfortunate, unfeeling—”

“Frankenpecker.”

Anna blinked at me in mild horror.

“That’s Jake’s term, not mine.”

“The point is, dear…to me it wasn’t about sex or pleasure or any of those lovely things. It was about identity. And completion. I couldn’t feel complete with what I’d been given. It just wasn’t possible. I imagine Jake feels the same way.”

“But Jake doesn’t
want
the surgery,” I pointed out. “He wants to ignore that part of himself completely. Doesn’t that seem like a waste to you?”

She shrugged. “We’re not Jake, are we?”

I took a sip of my sherry and stared out at the growing gloom, the darkening green of the sycamore trees. We were so quiet for a while that I could hear Anna’s mantel clock ticking in the other room, and, outside, the sound of children laughing in the street. There were more of them than ever in the Castro these days; the landscape was forever reshaping itself.

“So,” said Anna, suddenly chipper. “When did gay men start liking vaginas?”

17

The Cave

M
y buddy Brian at the nursery has such a passion for Native Americana that he’s made a ritual of searching for a local landmark called Ishi’s Cave. He takes the N Judah streetcar to Cole Valley, stocks up on trail mix at Whole Foods, and climbs the winding streets above the medical center until he comes to the edge of a forest. Strictly speaking, it’s not really a forest, just a big grove of eucalyptus trees planted by schoolchildren one Arbor Day in the late nineteenth century. But somewhere on the slopes of this city canyon lies a cave—no bigger than an igloo—that once sheltered the last Stone Age man in America.

Or so Brian believes.

I have my doubts about this, having joined Brian on one of his many futile expeditions. I think the cave is largely his excuse for telling Ishi’s story, which is all the more haunting because it’s a matter of historical record. Ishi, as you may know, was the last of his tribe. He lost his entire family to bounty hunters, then stumbled out of his remote California valley, sick with loneliness and grief, throwing himself on the mercy of the white man. This was 1911. There were trains and telephones and automobiles in Ishi’s scary new world. He was taken to San Francisco, where a kindly professor made him an exhibit at the anthropology museum. There he became a global celebrity; hoards of sightseers swarmed to the museum every Sunday to watch “the wild man” carve arrowheads and string bows. Ishi, obligingly, would sweep the floor afterward, and generally tidy up the place, then sleep in a small storeroom on the premises, not far from the reassembled bones of his ancestors. When the crowds got too much for him, he took to climbing the hill above the museum and sitting alone in a cave—
that
cave—as if to connect with the world he had lost forever.

The part about the cave is more local legend than established fact—a little too New Age-y romantic to be trusted. But it’s comforting to think that Ishi
might
have found such a refuge, however briefly. He died of tuberculosis five years after entering the modern world. The professor had promised his friend not to perform an autopsy (that procedure being contrary to native beliefs), but the professor was in Europe when Ishi died and had apparently neglected to leave instructions. Ishi’s brain was removed and shipped away for research. Its whereabouts remained a mystery until the end of the century when it was found floating in formaldehyde at a Smithsonian Institution warehouse in Maryland. After Indian activists lobbied fiercely for the brain’s return, it was finally laid to rest in the foothills of Mount Lassen, the homeland of Ishi’s people.

The burial spot, understandably, remains a secret.

“Okay,” said Brian, apropos of nothing, “this time I got it nailed.”

We were at the nursery—a week after I got home from Florida—and he was helping me load an especially weighty laburnum into my truck.

“Are we speaking of a lady?” I asked.

“Nah, man. Ishi’s cave.”

“That was my second guess.”

Brian gave the laburnum a final shove, then collapsed on the tailgate, gasping from the effort. “Seriously. I met this old hippie who says he stayed there overnight at the Winter Solstice.”

“No shit?” I sat next to him, brushing the burlap dirt off my hands. “Did he say what he was on?”