Redefining Realness (20 page)

For our first date, Adrian picked me up in his red Jetta, and we ate at the Spaghetti Factory at Ward Warehouse, the same place where my family gathered every year for Grandma Pearl’s birthday. Honestly, I was paranoid, fearful that I’d see someone from school who’d call out “Charles!” in front of Adrian, whom I assumed didn’t know I was trans. Periodically, I’d look around to see if anyone I knew was in the restaurant. But as dinner progressed, my nerves subsided, and I fell into the groove of a girl on a date with a guy. We talked about our siblings, about where we grew up, and about Adrian’s fear of having to one day use the infantry skills he had learned as a new marine.

Just as I began enjoying his presence over dinner in the dimly lit restaurant, he kissed me softly and a bit off target, on the left side of my mouth. The entire date, I reasoned that we hadn’t been physical,
so not telling him was fine. Things changed after that kiss. I was anxious about how and when I’d tell him: over the phone? Outside the car? In a letter?

When he dropped me off that night, I told him I needed to talk to him. He turned the key in the ignition, silencing his engine. I could see the whites of his eyes, so bright, as he looked at me intently.

“I don’t know what you’ll think of this, but I just wanted to let you know,” I started, “that I’m a virgin and committed to not having sex until I find the right person.”

Adrian just smiled, kissing me on my forehead and saying he wasn’t in a rush. I went home thinking that statement would get me a few more innocent dates. Lying in bed that night, I felt giddy, though I knew that telling Adrian I was trans would most likely lead to the courtship’s end. The next time we got together at his friend’s apartment to watch a football game, I kept my business to myself. I held court with Adrian on a love seat, where his muscular arms were draped over my shoulders as he whispered jokes and random sentiments to me. “You are the prettiest girl in Hawaii,” he said. “Do you realize that?”

I felt close to Adrian despite knowing nothing about him. I was a sixteen-year-old virgin, and I knew that disclosure was imminent. The moment I decided to tell him was the moment when I stopped being a girl and became a woman. Carelessness was not an option for a girl like me. I had a responsibility to own who I was, despite the stigma that existed about being trans.

As we pulled up in front of my apartment building, Adrian asked, “When can I see you again?”

I smiled, aware that this would be the last time he would look at me with the glow that comes from the newness of infatuation.

“That’s sweet, but I’m not like other girls, you know?” I began.

“I like that about you,” he said cheekily. I could tell by his playful
expression that he had no idea about my past, about my present, about the girl he had been wooing for the past two weeks.

“I’m being serious. I’m not like other girls,” I stammered. “I was born with the wrong parts and am waiting to have surgery to change that.” I was vague on purpose; having to say that I’d been born a boy and was years and thousands of dollars away from having any kind of surgery was a reality I couldn’t own up to yet.

He pulled away instantly. His face turned from the sweet, soft-eyed expression I had admired to one that was coarse, suited not for a girl but for men preparing for battle. I was afraid I had made a tragic mistake, telling him in his car with no one around.

“I can’t believe this,” he said, not so much to me but to himself. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

Because you’d look at me the way you’re looking at me now, like some creature from a faraway land, void of human feeling
, I wanted to say. I could hear his disgust in his tone, see it in his expression. I was no longer an attractive woman he was eager to see again; he perceived me as something artificial. To Adrian, I was this inauthentic woman trying to deceive him, possibly with the intention to get him into bed. In our patriarchal culture that values masculinity over femininity, my disclosure shook Adrian, challenging his heteronormative and cisnormative ideals.

“Sorry,” I said, apologizing for who I was, ashamed of who I was, too young to know the right thing to have done. “I just didn’t know how to tell you.”

“I’m not like that. I’m not gay,” he said, shaking his head. “This is just too much.”

Heartbroken, I opened the car door, crying over how this would be the first of a long line of romantic rejections, how no man would ever love me because I was a different kind of girl, how unlucky I was. Now, over a decade later, I look at how lucky I was to walk out of
Adrian’s car, to cry in my bed, to wake up the next day. I now know that the world can be a brutal place for a girl with a penis.

Many cis people assume that trans women, whether we “pass” as cis or not, are pretending to be someone we are not, and often expect us to disclose that we are trans to all we meet. Disclosure should be an individual personal choice based on circumstances such as safety, access, and resources. Discussions around disclosure often get heated when we discuss trans women and their romantic relationships with heterosexual cis men. When disclosure occurs for a trans woman, whether by choice or by another person, she is often accused of deception because, as the widely accepted misconception goes, trans women are not “real” women (meaning cis women); therefore, the behavior (whether rejection, verbal abuse, or severe violence) is warranted. The violence that trans women face at the hands of heterosexual cis men can go unchecked and uncharted because society blames trans women for the brutality they face. Similar to arguments around rape, the argument goes that “she brought it upon herself.” This pervasive idea that trans women deserve violence needs to be abolished. It’s a socially sanctioned practice of blaming the victim. We must begin blaming our culture, which stigmatizes, demeans, and strips trans women of their humanity.

Months later, I spotted Adrian walking toward me on the Waikiki Strip while hanging with a few girlfriends. I was immediately anxious and considered ducking into a store to avoid crossing paths. His jovial smile when he saw me threw me, and the hug and kiss he gave me surprised me. He was just as tipsy as when we first met, and he immediately asked to speak to me privately, leading me away from my friends to a bench in front of an ABC Store on Kalakaua Avenue.

“You know, I still feel bad about the way I reacted,” he said. “I just never had that happen to me. It’s the kind of shit you see in a movie, not in real life.”

I was too young and eager for his attention to be offended by the comparison of my life as fiction, so I thanked him and hugged him. We chatted for a bit before kissing again. This time I felt freer because I was just me without the obligation to tell him anything more about me. We soon headed across the street to Waikiki Beach, where we made out heavily as the dark sea rumbled in front of us. Weeks later, I lost my virginity to Adrian in his barracks in Kaneohe, and he was sweet to me despite the awkwardness I felt with my body, covering my genitals with my hands as he slid inside me.

“It’s okay,” he said, kissing me sweetly and pulling my arms above my head. “You’re beautiful, do you know that?”

It was fun and sweet, and we had sex a few more times, usually late at night, when I was bored and he was tipsy. I felt beautiful when he was inside me, looking at my face as I gave him pleasure, but it was always bittersweet. I could make him feel good with a body that I had yet to recognize as good.

M
om and I stood on the balcony overlooking the parking lot, watching a burly man hook her silver Honda to his tow truck. I expected her to run downstairs and plead for her car, but she just rolled her eyes as it rolled away.

“Fucking idiot,” Mom sputtered, unapologetic about her raw language, one of the bad habits she had adopted during her nearly three-year relationship with Rick, who hadn’t been to the apartment in days. Though Rick’s absence irked the hell out of my mother, she was used to it. He had landed himself back in jail a few times during part deux of their relationship so often that I can’t even recall when he was in or out. I just enjoyed his absences, whether they lasted weeks or months.

I rarely crossed paths with Rick, but my brothers spent time with him daily as he shuttled them to and from school in Kalihi. Chad, fifteen, was a freshman at Farrington, where he was a receiver on the JV football team and saw Wendi regularly in the hallways. Jeff, ten, scoffed at any kind of activity that required him to
be away from the Disney Channel. I can see him clearly, lying on his stomach in front of our television with his dirty feet up in the air, glued to the antics of
Lizzie McGuire
, Shia LaBeouf in
Even Stevens
, or
That’s So Raven
.

Our apartment was still in Rick’s absence. I felt safest when it was just the four of us, quietly watching TV together without the interruptions of his pacing. He had been to dark places and brought a foreboding shadow into our home and his relationship with Mom. His drug-fueled presence was hard to miss. It was apparent in his eyes rejecting any spark of light, in the way his bottom lip jutted in and out unconsciously, and in the way Mom’s attention narrowed on his needs, wants, and desires. Her focus on Rick dug her deeper into a self-imposed isolation that distanced us from our grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

Papa was vocal about his intolerance of Rick, whom he still saw as the teen delinquent who knocked up his firstborn child, and in return, Rick was vocal about his dislike of Papa. My mother, feeling judged by most of her family, who suspected she was on drugs, slowly dodged family gatherings at my grandparents’ home. We had been away from our grandparents’ apartment for more than a year, a time period that coincided with my most transformative years. Though I missed my family, their absence eased my worries about being accountable to even more people in my life.

The only person we saw with regularity was Grandma Pearl, who remained Mom’s nonjudgmental ally. Their closeness was apparent in the way they whispered to each other on the phone. I remember Mom discreetly reaching out to Grandma with frequency in desperation as her economic instability worsened, always pleading, “Please don’t tell Dad.” My mother has said on many occasions in reflection that she would not have been able to stay afloat if it weren’t for Grandma, who stepped in when she needed her most, from raising
Cheraine and babysitting each of us to the cash handouts she offered without expectations of repayment.

“Take care of your mom, yeah,” Grandma told me after breakfast at the Original Pancake House around the corner from her apartment. There was a note of defeat in her voice that shook me. She knew that she had done all she could for my mother, and she knew it wasn’t enough to pull her from Rick’s grasp.

Weeks later, Rick returned to the apartment, and an epic screaming match ensued about the car’s repossession, about the missed rent payments, about the fact that he wasn’t holding up his end of the bills. We had grown used to their fights, but nothing prepared us for the plan Rick returned with.

“We’re moving,” Mom announced one Saturday morning, giving each of us one big blue storage bin to pack our things in. “Anything that you don’t need now, we’ll box up and leave at Cori’s.”

Plainly, Mom wasn’t earning enough to renew our lease in Salt Lake. She couldn’t commit to the monthly rent, knowing full well that Rick’s share would be spent on drugs. With the help of a longtime friend whose pity led him to give Mom his beat-up Volvo wagon, we took temporary residence at a motel near the airport. Our room at the Pacific Marina Inn had two twin beds—one for Jeff and me, the other for Mom and Rick—and a cot where Chad slept without complaint. Mom and Rick scrounged up money every week to cover the room. Chad and Jeff initially found the motel exciting, splashing around in the pool and running to Byron’s, a favorite local diner, for a bite when they got antsy. It was an adventure, something new and thrilling and fleeting.

The motel was filled with transient sounds, from the clacks of well-worn heels signaling the comings and goings of sex workers, to the planes distantly buzzing at the airport, to the jingling of the charms on Mom’s purse as she returned home late at night with Rick
tweaking at her side. I thought our living situation, like these sounds, would be temporary. I knew that they wouldn’t be able to sustain this chaos for much longer, yet I didn’t see a solution in sight. There was nothing I could do to lift my brothers out of this place, and loyally, I felt my place was beside my mother, whom I didn’t want to leave with Rick.

I remember the fear that woke me the night Mom returned to the room at three
A.M.
with her hand wrapped in a bandage after getting stabbed by Rick. Apparently, Rick, coming down from a high, had confronted a driver who cut him off on Nimitz Highway, the road leading to the motel. When the guy approached the Volvo at a stoplight, Rick reached for his Swiss army knife and jumped out of the car. Mom followed Rick, trying to calm him down. As Rick aimed the knife at the guy, Mom reached for the blade.

“She thinks she’s Wonder Woman,” Rick told us, shaking his head, obviously amused.

“Fucking asshole was about to stab the guy,” Mom said, thinking it made sense to grab a knife to save her man from getting arrested.

They were beyond dysfunctional. I watched them cuddle closely in the twin bed, Rick kissing her forehead as she rested her head on his bare chest. I had no frame of reference for this kind of love; my mother’s dangerous attraction puzzled me.

Rick was blatantly not good for Mom from the start of their courtship at Farrington High School, where they met in her junior year. Mom liked his sweet, brooding nature. She felt he was misunderstood, and she became his first ally. Mom had been looking for an escape from the verbally abusive and volatile environment Papa created at home, and Rick became that escape for her. Mom welcomed Cori in November 1976, just six months before graduation. Rick was soon sentenced to juvenile detention and then prison, the setting of most of his adulthood. Mom recently told me that she married Rick
while he was in jail after Cheraine was born in 1979. I couldn’t conceal the shock on my face. It was difficult imagining my mother, with two babies at her side, marrying Rick in a men’s prison.