Real Man Adventures (17 page)

The kids help me slide the thing out, encourage me to try it on. Which I do, abashedly. But it feels perfect, isn’t too torn up, is stained in just a couple places, and, most compellingly, doesn’t smell funky. I pull out a ten and hand it to the lady with the baby, whose other hand rests atop an old-fashioned metal cash box.

“I guess he found his lucky number!” the older lady says saucily, rubbing her hands together as if in anticipation of the games that will be taking this football season way down into fall.

I smile and thank them both, then start to take the jersey off, but D— encourages me to leave it on.

“That seems a little sad,” I say.

She looks around theatrically; young and old alike are of course sporting all manner of jerseys and T-shirts, jackets and hats, dumpy sweatpants and sweat towels with the home team’s name and mascot emblazoned across them.

“It looks good,” she adds unironically, making me feel really old. So I shrug, throw my jacket over it, and we three head off to find a perch from which to take in the second half of the game.

I don’t mean to sound maudlin, but just then a ragtag riot of maroon-and-black home jerseys retakes the field just on the other side of the chest-high chain-link fence that separates players from crowd, and before I can shut it down, I am caught in a rare flash of regret, nostalgia for what never was—okay, fuck it: I start feeling a little ROBBED of a fucking boyhood in which the perfect number 12 jersey I am now wearing isn’t just some bullshit novelty item I bought to support the local high school team’s fund-raising efforts, but rather something I actually worked my ass off for years in order to earn the privilege of donning. Of dirtying myself.

It is precisely at this point I feel my little girl—the one who will be taller than I in six months if she keeps going at the rate she’s going—grab my arm and hold on to it tight as we walk in front of the bleachers, the younger one pulling slightly ahead to scout us some seats. It is, I recognize immediately, one of those few perfect moments you get in life, a moment that punctures time if you let it, and no matter how cheesy or dumb or obvious, or akin to a
television commercial for FUCKING ABILIFY it feels like thinking it, there you are, telling yourself, more realization than directive:

You will never forget how this feels.

With both of her arms tight around yours. With her not yet having figured out that moments like these with her dad—in front of hundreds of teenagers on the bleachers (sitting on each other’s laps, investigating and comparing lip-piercing infections, every utterance shouted two clicks too loud)—will embarrass her to no end sometime very soon. That this might be one of the last times, if not the last, she reaches for you like that, a kid who needs you and knows she does, reminding you:
dickhead, you would likely never be here on this side of the fence right now, had you ever been over on that one.

_______________________________

1.
Remember future Academy Award winner Helen Hunt starring in a 1983 made-for-TV movie,
Quarterback Princess
, based on the true story of Tami Maida, who QBed her high school team to win the state championship in Oregon in 1981? I do.

2.
Or some configuration of these honors, but all of them at one point or another during my sophomore through senior years.

1) My wife sometimes refers to my species—well, me in particular—as a “magical unicorn.”

2) In my experience, a good number of transmen are quite comfortable showing their bodies (and their torsos) publicly, on the Internet, in galleries, posing for photographers, etc. In fact, a whole bunch of transpeople, MTFs and FTMs alike, will document every nuance of their transition from beginning to end and beyond online, in photos, videos on YouTube, and various websites dedicated to
sharing information with others who are either undergoing a similar process, or contemplating transition. On sites like Facebook and Myspace (R.I.P.), I’ve seen guys put up a new photo of themselves every week, so you’ll have literally dozens upon dozens of photos of the same person, holding up a camera in the mirror, striking their best pose.

I personally can’t think of anything more harrowing (not to mention narcissistic) than having hundreds of photos of myself appearing as self-consciously handsome as possible posted anywhere publicly, but I think I can relate to a constant, seemingly renewable source of wonder on these guys’ parts: sometimes you’ll catch yourself in the mirror, hear yourself on a voicemail message, or see yourself in a photo, and for one tiny moment, there you are, gob-smacked like the rest of the world is by the improbability of your existence:
That’s me? The fuck did this happen?

On the other hand, there’s a whole other contingent of transguys who, wishing to live stealthily in the world, resent when fellow transmen show their bodies—specifically the scars on their chests—publicly like I’m doing here. This is because they believe that the more “regular” people know what torsos belonging to transmen who’ve had top surgery look like, the less opportunity for those wanting to live stealthily to do so effectively. I used to think that argument so hysterical and even preposterous, like, How could you possibly think you can hide something like that? Dude, wear a wife-beater until the scars fade or something! I’ve even heard about some stealth transguys answering the occasional benign question, “What happened to your chest?” with, “I had lung surgery,” and leaving it at that. Yeah, it was real fucking preposterous and hysterical, right up until the time I heard those exact words spontaneously spewing from my own mouth when confronted with the same question at a swimming pool in Florida one bright and sunny afternoon.

3) There’s still this messed-up part of me—and perhaps this entire book is evidence of it—that wants to scream,
Amazing
, right?! I know, we look just like “real” men, don’t we?! Anybody would be confused! You’d never know! You see: we really are men. We are really masculine. In fact, a number of us actually reflect a rather narrow, though widely recognized and decidedly mainstream version of masculinity. We could be pledging Sigma Chi, or sweating there next to you in the steam room at Equinox. Hell, the gays even go for us—and who’s a more dependable arbiter of masculinity than a horny homo?

_______________________________

1.
All four of the bodies you see in Gallery A and Gallery B belong to transgender men, people who were assigned female at birth, but transitioned into men (I might or might not be one of the four). They’re here for three reasons:

Side by side like kin

You would kill me if you knew

Mine’s bigger than yours

T
HERE
’
S THIS TERRIBLE OIL
painting by an unknown artist hanging in our TV room, and when my wife and I have a (usually ridiculous) fight, I sometimes find myself alone on the couch late in the evening, staring at the horrible (okay, wonderful) thing. It’s a thrift-store find, marked $3.50 in old-timey looking handwriting on the back of the canvas, and it was probably painted in the forties or fifties, but it is seemingly set a little earlier, during Prohibition. Just this man and his kid, both clad in denim and standing in front of two harnessed and blinkered Clydesdale horses with a farm and silo in the background. The man holds a jug of what I’m assuming is moonshine, his blocky hands just about to uncork it, eyes drifting lovingly down at the jug, while his tiny son gazes up at his father with some sort of admiration on his face. I
think
. (The artist is not the best with expressions
or emotion—or farmhouses, pastures, and mountains. S/he is passable at horses, the muscles in their legs at least.)

There is something dreadfully wrong with the people in the painting. They are proportioned wrong, almost like Eastern Bloc gymnasts, even though they are likely supposed to be in West Virginia or Tennessee or Kentucky. They are practically little people, veritable dwarfs, especially the son. Their faces are just awful, rubbery Kewpie doll–like.

I sit there staring at this scene, lit only by ambient light, the room otherwise dark, TV off for the time being. Everyone else asleep, even the dogs. The old house alternately creaking or completely still. Me of course feeling misunderstood.
Mister
Understood. Pathetic. I can hear the hard drive of the cable box spinning, almost like the swivel of vertebrae on vertebrae in the neck segment of my spinal column. I just sit there staring at the little dwarf kid, his stupid, bright-eyed and hopeful eyebrow arch, and how he’s NOT EVEN LOOKING directly at his father, like if you drew a dashed sight line from his pupils, that line would hit the tip of one of the horse’s ears, way above the father’s head. And he’s so tiny and ill-proportioned… what is he standing on? Is he the only one standing atop a rock, while the horses and dad are on solid ground? Or is it a hay bale? If so, why isn’t it showing? And if he’s in fact that small, then he should be just learning to toddle, not be rendered like a little man with his flippery little hands and WAY TOO SHORT arms and no lips like the girl without a mouth in that
Twilight Zone
episode.

There is just something
wrong
about them, something very
wrong
about this short little boy in particular. Why are his arms so
stubby and stuck to his sides, no joints in the elbows? And is that a maroon sash around his waist?

I hate myself so much, staring at the guy with his moonshine and his little dwarf kid adoring him. I hate myself for being complicated. For bringing complications into my wife’s life. And the kids’. It’s not that she’s said anything, but I hate that she has to think about things she never had to think about before. If I were just normal, born what I am, born male or whatever I am, she wouldn’t have to be afraid, wouldn’t have to think twice about disclosing information that should otherwise be harmless. Wouldn’t ever have to feel the opposite of pride, what is it, shame? Ever. Sometimes it gets so tiring for us both, wondering about that extra layer, parsing what people might or might not do when they “find out.” Preposterous, but sometimes disclosure tips into danger. Then I hate myself even more for caring what anybody thinks or does. For thinking that I can actually do anything to thwart somebody who truly wishes to do me harm.

Or maybe I just say I wouldn’t change anything because I can’t change anything. It’s not possible, so why waste even a passing thought on it?

Sometimes seeing old photographs of myself brings up rage like the rage that comes on those fight nights on the couch, me alone in the dark beneath that moonshine painting. Or sometimes I don’t have any feelings about old photographs at all, feel instead completely removed and apart. Perhaps I should’ve figured out a few things sooner.

There have been some wasted years.

Or they weren’t wasted.

That painting just makes me so
angry
, eats me from the inside, and after about an hour or two of resisting tiptoeing upstairs, waking her up, disturbing her already troubled sleep, and telling her I’m sorry, sorry for all of it, even everything we weren’t even fighting about, even things I think I’m “right” and you’re “wrong” about, that I’m sorry and I would do anything to make it up to you, to please just touch me and let me touch you right now and don’t just sleep/not sleep there clutching that pillow between us, grazing one another only on accident, down near the ankles. Somewhere after resisting this impulse for hours, but before I get so deliriously tired I can’t resist anymore is when I reach for the remote and flip it to
The First 48
, which is usually on TV, and if it’s not on, then I usually have several episodes of it taped on DVR so I can watch them one after the other on rare nights like these.