The Last Magazine: A Novel (23 page)

Peoria tunes out. The whole thing sounds ridiculous now, and he wants to direct Justina back on track to the more important story, the story about her. All this bullshit about Sheehan is getting tiresome.

“Okay, yeah, yeah, so it didn’t happen, and when you looked into her eyes or something, you came to realize something about yourself?”

“Yes, that’s right, I—”

He cuts her off. “Great. Okay, so you go back to El Paso and your family isn’t like, what, supportive?”

“Oh, they were supportive. They wanted me to be a hero. They presented me to friends saying I was a hero. My mother would cut in front of lines at Applebee’s or Outback and say, we should sit first, our son is a hero, a veteran, a wounded soldier. They didn’t tell
anyone what my true injury was. They didn’t want that information to get out—they just said I was shot in the lower regions and that I was recovering.”

“Right, right.”

“I curled up in a little ball in my house. My bedroom that I had had as a teenager, there I was, supposed to be a man in his twenties and living in his parents’ house, in his old bedroom, same posters, same desk for studying, same all of this. I acted like I couldn’t walk, like I was too sore, and my parents, they accepted this. I could have walked, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay in bed. I wanted to just wither away. I stopped cutting my hair. I stopped taking those testosterone pills. I stopped those things, and I drifted, for weeks.

“My anger, after I stopped taking the pills, my anger started to go away. Like a eunuch. At first, I missed my anger—my anger was all that I had—but I didn’t want to take some pills to be a man. For three days, I shook—I shook with the emptiness of these fucking hormones to make up for what would have been in my testicles! I woke up—”

“When?”

“This was five months after my Alive Day, they call it. Alive Day. A sick fucking joke, someone at HBO must have devised it, I don’t know, to make us feel good, rather than call it Blown-to-Shit Day. The shakes had stopped—I had stopped shaking from lack of anger—and no, it was no peace, but I walked by the Dallas Cowboys poster, I walked by the picture of Miguel Fernandez in his Tecate-sponsored open-wheel racing car—we had gone down to, my father and I, to watch him race and got a picture, all of us smiling, the sponsored beer, red and green in the backdrop. I went to the bathroom and I took a shower and I picked up a shampoo—my mother’s shampoo, a coconut-scented flavor from Vidal Sassoon, and I cleaned my long hair, down to my shoulders, and I stepped out and tied a
towel around my head like I had seen my sisters do, and I saw how much weight I had lost, how thin I looked, and I looked down at the scar and it looked like a vagina. I smiled, I smiled and I batted my eyelashes, and I inhaled, and I felt at peace, because what I had been resisting, what I had been resisting was that I was no longer a man, yes, and that I was really a woman now, I was a female. I was thin and effeminate-looking always, and perhaps it would always have been so, but if it wasn’t for fate, if it wasn’t for that shrapnel, I would not have seen it, or it would have taken me years to see it, to act on it.”

A.E. Peoria hits the stop button on the tape recorder and thinks, Man, this chick or dude is fucking nuts. He slips the tape recorder in his pocket and realizes that he has an erection.

I
don’t expect to see Peoria back in the office so soon.

“Mike, dude, good that you’re here,” he says, elbows on the cubicle wall. “I took your advice—I decided to come and talk to Delray M. Milius, to make amends, you know, and to pitch that story I told you about.”

“Cool, bro, that’s cool.”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. I gave him the exact opposite advice. But I suppose that’s what he wants to do, and no matter what I had said, he had interpreted it as confirmation of what he had already decided.

I’m surprised that Milius even agreed to speak to him after the pencil incident—I thought for sure it was just a matter of time before Peoria got canned permanently.

“He said I could bring you in as a research assistant, you know, to help me get some background to the story. You have time for that?”

“Ah yeah, just doing a couple things for Sanders and Nishant, no worries.”

“Okay, great. I gave you the details last time we met, right? About what I was sitting on? Swore you to secrecy, obviously too, as this can’t leak out, you know? It’s all very sensitive.”

“Sure—”

The Peoria that I knew is back—divulging, disclosing, vomiting up his exclusive story. It’s kind of mind-boggling to hear. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. Sure, there are gays in the military stories, and there are stories over the past few years about transgendered kids in high school and college, and about how some state universities, like the University of Vermont, were creating unisex, or multisex, or transgendered bathrooms because the risk of attack on transgendered people is extremely high if they go into a men’s room, and they aren’t quite accepted in the ladies’ room either. But never had I heard of a shemale war hero.

“Not ‘shemale,’ dude, that’s not a politically correct term. Plus, she’s got no junk anyway anymore, so it doesn’t make you a shemale unless you have, like, a dick and breasts—she’s working on the breasts, though. But really, what I need from you is to get me the science behind it, and some of the social context for this—talk to a few experts in the transgendered community. Don’t quite tell them what we’re talking about, you know, but we want to get the legal issues and everything resolved first, you know. We’re really going to be doing Chipotle a favor, I think.”

“So she’s cool with you running the story?”

“Oh, you know, man, she doesn’t really want to do a story about it, at least not right now, but sometimes the news value has to outweigh personal considerations. You can’t just sit on a scoop like this because the person you know could get hurt by it.”

“You don’t want her to get kicked out of school and lose her benefits, though, right?”

“Yeah, that’s probably going to happen, you know, but there are enough support groups and shit out there that if she does lose that, I’m sure someone will step in, you know?”

“Okay, right, maybe.”

“Yeah, maybe, there’s no guarantee in this business on anything, you know. Like that lady said: Anyone who does journalism and doesn’t realize that what we’re doing is totally immoral is a fucking clown, you know?”

“That’s cool, dude, yeah, of course.”

“Okay, man, I’ve got to run, because I’m, like, meeting her later tonight for what I hope will be the final interview—I’ve already got like thirteen hours’ worth of audio files—maybe you can start working on transcribing those too? You have the Sony program, right? My other notes, you know, just keep them to yourself and everything.”

Another assignment. If Delray M. Milius is willing to put his grudge behind him, I realize that this is probably going to be a big story to be part of, and I’m glad he thought of me to work on it. That means, including the Iraq stories, I will have contributed to more than thirty-five feature stories over the past year, which will put me way out ahead of the rest of the newbies.

Sanders strolls by my desk.

“Have my notes for the Imus show ready?” he asks me.

“Oh, coming along, no worries.”

“I don’t like to look bad on that show—he can throw some tough ones at you,” he says.

Sanders has become a regular guest on the Don Imus program, one of the highest-rated radio shows in the country. Along with Oprah, Imus can move books like nobody else—and Sanders’s book had moved, thanks to his regular appearances and endorsement by Imus. It’s been a regular task for me to do, to get notes
together on the possible subjects Imus might bring up on the show, maybe write a few jokes for him, or possible subjects. Not that Imus or his producers ever stick to the topics Sanders tells me they are going to talk about—a continuing source of annoyance for Sanders. I get to work writing up the notes.

W
atching transsexual pornography started as research but it has become a compulsion within days. Men who are now women is the category that A.E. Peoria Googles. Full-blown transsexuals. Hundreds of thousands of links appear, safety filter off, images and video clips and paid sites. The shemales, the he-shes, the cross-dressers, the post-op and pre-op transsexuals, strap-on kings and queens—how much of this community, percentage-wise, he wonders, is involved in pornography or cabarets or strip clubs? And isn’t it odd to base one’s whole life around sex? Or did we all base our lives around sex, and if you could get a job focused on sex, perhaps you were ahead of the game? Perhaps the transsexuals understood something that no one else did? But what’s the point of becoming a ladyboy if you aren’t going to hustle on the street?

But Justina isn’t a ladyboy or a shemale—she’s a transsexual, and she wants to pursue a career in academia, in writing, in the arts or in advocacy, eventually. Advocacy, there’s another popular profession for transsexuals. You either got a job in the sex industry or got a job advocating for transsexuals’ rights. Advocacy and pornography
and show tunes—the three primary industries of the transgendered community.

Peoria’s morning research starts with his iced coffee and a check of the email and the list of phone numbers of experts he wants to call.

Up at six a.m., hitting his stride again, feeling for the first time since before the Iraq War that drive, that fulfilling call of work, a sense of purpose—a story to write and to tell and to understand. On his laptop, on his wireless, he streams a local news radio show—usually, the program he starts listening to is
Imus in the Morning
—but the pull of the boundless Internet, with all of its perversions, drags him back to free porn sites, and he lowers the blinds in his apartment, pulls down his track pants, and watches the explicit sexual acts.

As a young man growing up, photos in magazines were enough to get him off. First, publications like
Playboy
were good enough, but then he upgraded to
Penthouse
; the open vaginal and anal shots of
Penthouse
, still done respectfully, were the next level. Then, he discovered
Hustler
, and his masturbatorial bar was set even higher—
Hustler
, now that was explicit, threesomes, full penetration, dripping cum shots, and a new and enticing category called Barely Legal, which forever altered the way he viewed young female teenagers running cash registers at ice cream stands and in grocery stores and Japanese school uniforms and cheerleading outfits.

When he got his own apartment out of college, in the ’90s, he was able to own his first VHS player and visit his first sex shops in the city, on 33rd Street: a candy store, all the different racks of various interests for sale, and all he had to do was duck in and buy the videotapes to see those still images that had worked for him for so long come to life. The sheer freedom of being able to rewind and fast-forward and pause, with no worries of parents or siblings ruining his privacy. That’s freedom. He never bought another magazine again.

The Internet proved to be a disruptive force for self-abuse. With the Internet, the sheer range of digital images did the job at first—he was able to stop watching videos on the VHS and start watching, on his computer, acts that he had read about but never seen—women sucking off farm animals, women urinating on the faces of other women, women urinating on the faces of other men, men urinating in clear streams into the open mouths of women, defecating even, strapped and bound with metal and leather contraptions, penetrated with massive objects like baseball bats and giant rubber dildos, a foot in diameter, or shaken soda cans stuffed in rectal canals, and on and on. These images—who was putting them out there? Where was it all coming from? And what an amazing thing it was, all of this that previously one would have had to order via the U.S. Postal Service from a European country, now all available thanks to the spread of dial-up connections and 32-bit modems.

The Internet, he knows, had been developed by DARPA at the Defense Department, for war, but sex quickly took over as the primary innovator, from the days of the first chat rooms. Now, with DSL and cable connections and streaming video feeds, digital images of the most grotesque and enticing kind no longer worked to get Peoria off. He had to see the movement, he needed the image to be flashing at 32 frames a second, in a little box on his screen, uninterrupted—watching porn on a slow connection didn’t even do it, he needed a high-speed connection or he just wasn’t into it.

He was not terribly concerned about the moral implications until June 2002, when he’d gotten the fastest speed available and clicked on a link that said “vomit porn,” and at that moment he had a crisis of faith, or the closest thing one who does not believe in anything can have to a crisis of faith.

A white girl, wearing a blue skiers’ tuque with an embroidered golden star, had been kneeling down in front of a crowd and giving
head to a black male of significant perpendicular length. Using the now ancient deep-throating technique, she worked the man’s cock avidly, eyes watering, his large hands clasped around her ears, occasionally pulling out to the left or right to make a popping sound against the suction on her cheek. At minute 2:33 into the clip, the standard degradation went off course; at first, the male performer responded as if it were still part of the performance, but then she ripped his hands away and started to crawl away, a desperate move, as if she were a child with motion sickness in the back of the car trying to unroll the window, or a coed searching for a bathroom stall after expecting to come into the restroom only to touch up her makeup. She started to puke, a yellow and a watery flow, all over the ground, and the camera first zoomed in on her face as she vomited, and then the camera pulled back to get the reaction of the cheering crowd and the still-hard penis of the black performer, and then the video ended, and A.E. Peoria himself felt sick, he felt ill, and wondered if maybe he shouldn’t be watching this stuff, maybe it was destroying his soul, if there was such a thing.

That didn’t last long.

He thinks of it now because he’d had the same first reaction to the transsexual performers: that something was somehow unholy or desperately sick in the acts that were being performed, that it was somehow disturbing to his subconscious that the women being fucked in the ass used to be men. But as he watched, he instinctively started to touch himself, and he started to hold the images in his head of Thailand, enhancing a sexual experience that he had avoided masturbating to at all costs—he was straight after all, it was his parents who were gay—but the transsexual porn brought these memories back, and he no longer felt revulsion, and in fact, started to get off on the idea that the man fucking the woman was actually fucking a man, a dirty little secret that wasn’t a secret but added a level of fantasy to the
moving video clips, a level of fantasy that his own memories augmented.

After one week of research, he started to worry: In the same way that he was never able to go back to magazine porn after the Internet had evolved, would he ever be able to have normal sex again, with a normal female? Or had his fantasy wires been so crossed that he would need to keep upping the sexual illusions and delusions and confusion in order to reach a fulfilling orgasm? And then, he asked, in a rare moment of self-awareness, did he want to go back?

And then there is the issue that he tries to avoid. That he tries to sublimate with Oedipal and Freudian and Jungian rationalizations and all that—he tries to ignore that he really wants to fuck
Justina.