Real Man Adventures (22 page)

C
ENTURY
21
MAY SOUND LIKE
a realtor, but if you’ve ever lived in New York City, you know it to be the best quality new-clothing-at-a-steep-discount-outlet in the city. Twenty-two years old, and newly a New Yorker, I found my way to the original downtown store within the first month of signing the lease on my puny six-floor walk-up tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. (This was well before it was a bridge-and-tunnel nightlife destination; on the first night I moved in, I heard gunshots in the housing development across the street. I know, I’m so
gangster
.)

Emerging from the N train onto Cortlandt Street in front of the store, I searched straightaway for the twin towers of the World Trade Center, but I couldn’t find them. Not because they weren’t there (like nowadays), but rather because they were directly above
me, and I hadn’t gazed high enough to locate where they were. Or where I was.

Pushing through Century 21’s heavy front doors, I stepped into a generous, two-story atrium. I felt something pulling me past the Fendi purses and Boss belts, the Ferragamo wallets, luxurious shearling coats, toward the rear of the shop and up the first set of escalators. As I slowly ascended, seemingly ancient gears grinding beneath my soles, I could sense something twitching at the base of my neck; the tiny hairs of my recently shorn fade were standing at attention. At the top of the escalator I spotted what I’d come for: several large racks overflowing with Calvin Klein men’s undergarments: T-shirts, tank tops, and…
gulp
, underwear. I glanced left. Right. Ladies streamed toward a riot of designer bras and panties, while a couple guys lazily thumbed through flat, plastic-encased packs of crew-neck T-shirts as though they were vintage LPs.

I stiffly approached a rack containing the boxer briefs, just to the left of the regular old briefs, aka banana hammocks. My cheeks burned, chest pounded, palms sweaty as I quickly sought to ascertain the lay of the land: sizes small, medium, large, and extra large; basic colors of black, white, and heather gray (or gray stripes). CALVIN KLEIN conspicuously stitched on all of the wide elastic waistbands. I reached for a two-pack of white mediums, thinking I’d keep it simple, grab and run, and recover my composure in a safer, gender-neutral section of the store. But then the guy next to me coughed, a loud, hacking TB type of number, and it seemed like he might be faking it in attempt to get everybody within earshot—including store security, the gender police—to glance in our direction. To catch me in the act of attempting to break the gender barrier.

I looked downward, trying to stay cool, at least on the exterior. Was that Marky Mark posing in black and white on the cardboard insert I now held in my hand? Demonstrating precisely what the product would look like on my body—on my
package
—should I decide to purchase it?

I want to be him
filled my brain and stilled me. I grew steadier, resolute, stood a little taller.
I am him
. (Well, minus the third nipple. Or shit, I would even take the extra nipple if only I could look even a fraction like that dude.)
That’s what buying these boxers will make me look like
.

The hacking cougher disappeared behind a rack, near the V-neck undershirts. Nobody seemed to be paying me any mind, and it looked as if I would be alone for a spell. I glanced back and forth between the rows of underwear and the pack I held in my hand, closely studying the product specs. I noticed something I’d missed in all my haste to vacate the men’s unmentionables department—there was not one, but two varieties of boxer briefs on offer: classic boxer brief and button-fly boxer brief. Which did I want?

I made a quick decision that button-fly seemed somehow less masculine. More sensible. Less pushing my luck. Perhaps a cashier
would think I was just buying them to sleep in. They’re just so damn comfy!

I haphazardly stuffed the white mediums back on a rack and reached instead for two single packs of button fly boxer briefs in the same size: one striped gray, one black. Double-checked the Marky Mark look-alike for two buttons running down the fabric cradling his package, and then tucked the two items into an armpit and strode purposefully toward a carousel of Adidas workout pants. But I didn’t want Adidas workout pants. Or anything else. I’d already found what I came for, and after psyching myself up for a few more minutes before choosing whichever bored clerk would launch my maiden men’s undergarment voyage (excluding the requisite pairs of boxers I’d inherited from friends in high school and cherished), I waited in line between two ladies with heaps of couture in their arms and a cloud of overpowering perfume about them.

“Next? I can help you over here, ma’am.”

I slid my two thin packages across the counter. The plastic crinkled loudly when the middle-aged lady scooped them up. She didn’t even look at me, just scanned the items and mumbled, “Twenty-four fifty-three, cash or credit?”

I counted out two twenties. Still she didn’t glance up, just pressed the change and receipt into my palm. “I don’t need a bag!” I hollered, too loudly, while attempting to stuff the two pairs of underwear into my olive-drab canvas Manhattan Portage messenger bag. Then I got the hell out of there.

Once home I tore into the plastic of the gray striped boxer briefs, still breathless from the six-story climb. My little dog jumped on my leg and yapped, imploring me to take him for a walk. But he
could wait. I went into the bedroom and closed the door, a shard of a mirror hanging behind it. I didn’t even check whether my roommate was home; I needed to get a good, long look at myself. To see how it would feel, finally, after all these years.

I unbuttoned my jeans, one by one, trying to avert my eyes as I rolled blue cotton panties (the kind my mother still bought at outlet stores and periodically shipped to me), down my hairy legs and kicked them onto the floor under the bed. I unfurled the boxers, which were neatly folded around a rectangle of cardboard and Scotch-taped in place. I held them up and studied them for a beat before pressing them against my nose, inhaling deeply the fresh dyed cotton smell. The musk. The masculinity. Goddam Old Spice or something. Yeah!

I stepped into them.

Looked in the mirror. I still had on an Oxford-type button-down with a V-neck wool sweater over it, so I lifted both of these in the front so I could get a good look at the skivvies. Me in the skivvies. They were indeed soft, fit just right, tight enough so the trim hugged each thigh, but loose enough so that the pouch almost looked like it could have something in it. Not quite Marky Mark, but like a regular guy.

I smiled at myself. Popped a CD into the stereo and pressed play. “Boys Don’t Cry” by the Cure came on. I turned it up loud, crazy cat lady neighbor across the hall be damned, and started dancing around the room. My dog nosed his way through the door then, hopped up onto the bed, and sat there staring at me. I continued to ignore him. In between fly dance moves I slid open the top drawer of my dresser and fished out some tube socks. Kneaded the wad so
it was just right… and then slipped it down the front of my boxers. I held my thighs together a little so as not to lose my package.

I checked myself in the mirror one more time as Robert Smith faded out and “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus began. My dog shivered on the bed. I wondered whether he could discern the new man I was becoming in front of him.

I pulled my sweater off over my head, quickly unbuttoned my dress shirt, three-quarters bare-chested now. I squeezed my junk in a fist and made a punk rock face in the mirror. Damn, I looked good. I reached over my head and flicked the disco ball suspended from the ceiling where a light fixture should’ve been. It spun and swung, refracting orange late-afternoon light around the small room. I leaned over seductively and pressed RECORD on the video camera that was set up on a tripod beside the mirror, aimed directly at me. Then I patted around the top of my dresser for some lipstick, popped off the cap, and leaned in to the mirror/camera lens. I started applying the lipstick theatrically, sticking out my lips, pouting, seducing. “Would you fuck me?” I whispered in a low growl. There was no answer.

“I’d fuck me,” I answered myself, louder now. “I’d fuck me so hard.”

I stepped back farther so the camera could get a full body view, and draped a tasseled silk tapestry around my shoulders. That’s when I remembered the lady suit that I’d been sewing for months, hanging on a hook inside the closet. So I pulled out the top half of the suit and fit it over my head snugly like a wig, jagged scalp brushing my eyebrows. I slowly inched my new boxers halfway down my thighs. Got up on tippytoes and held my shawl aloft over my shoulders like some perfect, gorgeous god or something, getting a full look at my mangina in the mirror. The camera was catching all of this on tape, and the music crescendoed, and the room spun around me cinematically, and I fell back onto the bed just as the sky opened up outside my fire escape window and a clap of thunder echoed loudly through the narrow streets of the Lower East Side.

And that’s the moment when I knew: I’m going to be a MAN.

I AM a man.

No, that’s not what happened at all.

I just made all of that up. Well, the last bit is actually sampled from that scene in
Silence of the Lambs
when Jodie Foster is closing in on the homicidal transsexual Buffalo Bill, while his latest full-figured female victim is screaming in the dungeon below, trying to capture Bill’s beloved poodle Precious with a chicken bone tied to a string. Bill dances around in the lady skin suit he is methodically fashioning by sewing parts of his victims together, forcing them to condition their skin with body lotion before he kills them.

IT PUTS THE FUCKING LOTION IN THE BASKET!

He is ecstatic, high, autoeroticizing—and clearly delusional, we are meant to gather, as he leans in to the camera and breaks female character momentarily so he can tuck his penis tightly between his thighs before striking his most feminine pose, that silky fabric draped around him as if on a cross. “Goodbye Horses” blasting,
²
the red LED light pulsing on his video camera. It’s such a poignant moment because it captures precisely what all of us transsexuals do—male-to-female, female-to-male, whatever the fuck. We mutilate members of the “opposite” sex so that we can harvest their accoutrements—their skin, even—because we so despise the shell into which we were born. We weren’t born in the wrong bodies; we were born in the wrong skin!

No, none of this chapter is the “truth.”
³
There was never that one time
I just knew
. No seminal afternoon on which I sidled into a store to buy (or steal) my first piece of men’s clothing and then sneak it home to cross-dress before a mirror to reveal my true identity in the privacy of my chamber. There was no singular, climactic, revelatory moment. No first time stepping out on the street suddenly as a man, no first time bedding a woman as a guy, no tortured decade in my
twenties, loathing myself and my body, not fitting in anywhere, and unable to figure out that there was one missing piece to the puzzle that would make everything okay if I could only locate it in the shag rug beneath the coffee table.

No aha! moment. (Sorry, Oprah.)

It wasn’t when I bought my first suit and tie, changed my first form of ID, corrected somebody with, “I go by ‘he’” for the first time. I am finding it difficult to describe what it was. I can only seem to tell you what it was not.

Though I can say a few things with some measure of confidence: that I have always done the best I could with whatever I had—wherever I was—at any given point in my life. And that in all likeliness, I would’ve been able to
survive
as whatever I was had I not been fortunate enough to be in the position to pursue transition. I am, however, very happy
⁴
that I finally gave myself—in the third decade of life—the ability to go through the world as a man until I die.

Because it is also true that I do not particularly enjoy the image I have of myself during the years
before
I pulled on some style of boxers each morning before getting dressed.