the dead of summer & december blood magic
Live reports from the end of my girlhood / the end of the year / the beginning of something else. I found an old diary entry from August and combined it with some diary entries from the last month. I hope it is fun, interesting, or cathartic for you to read.
In the middle of August all I can think about are shallow graves dug into hard dirt. The image haunts me. When I shift back into consciousness every morning, I think of hollow graves in desert soil. Waking up feels like a car crash, a familiar feeling that I haven't felt in months, maybe a year. Every time I'm not actively depressed, it feels like I've defeated it. It feels like there's the old me, the person who didn't have their shit together and for whom everything seemed hard and scary, for whom the world seemed to be wrapped in a spiky cotton blanket, thick and itchy. And then there's the me from just-before-now, the person who was afloat and coping rather well, who naturally wakes up chirpily at 8 am, and has a couple of hours to walk around her apartment slowly coming to life. The person with a sheen of optimism, the desire to make the world better and the belief that it could be better.
The heat climbed up to 90-something several times this summer in Chicago, a bug-hot heat, the kind of heat that feels like it's gripping at you and pushing you down, the kind of heat that makes a cicada's song sound more like a shriek. The kind of heat that rings in your ears.
I have spent much of this summer with friends, traveling on the road, laughing and drinking and eating. Sleepovers, and long, long days walking until the sun has long said goodnight and farewell. It feels like that part of summer is fluffy clouds and butterflies, it's crickets and cicadas harmonizing and bats dancing around at twilight, it's bombastic waves on Lake Michigan and a man on a jet ski showing off, getting air. It's fucking by the air conditioner, once we've cooled down from being outside so we can get sweaty again. It's love and adoration, in friendship and sex and community. Sometimes it feels like this is the world I want to build, this is my queer utopia. It feels like If I keep going, if I keep trying, we can fix everything.
And then, inevitably, I go home, alone. Roadtrips terminate and I return the U-Haul, stop by Jewel, and carry all my frozen meals home because I can't eat fresh produce fast enough. The sleepovers end and it's time for me to sleep on my own couch. The 6 hour date is over and then we kiss good night, and I watch videos on my big screen if I'm being good and on my little screen if I'm being bad. Alone, alone, alone.
The only furniture in my room: a bed on a boxspring, a vanity mirror leaning on the floor, and a pile of clothes, clean and dirty, that I haven’t sorted, haven't taken to the basement to launder because I am in need of quarters, because I also refuse to pay the hiked-up rates on the coin machines on top of the hiked-up rent. I attempt a vivisection on the machine in the basement, exposing its guts, gears, and wires so that I can stick coffee stirrers into it's crevices, so that I can do my laundry for free. The machine chokes, sensing my intrusion, it shuts off completely, it's flat-lined. Because I want to continue avoiding my hot bedroom and the piles of clothes, I continue to sleep in my living room, where the air-conditioner is, on the futon where it's cool, where at least I have the company of my monstera, the twin sister to Emma's monstera, although mine is a little worse for wear.
Sometimes I feel lucky, to have so many friends in so many places. That I can visit so much of this country and there will be a warm and welcoming room for me there.
Sometimes, it does not feel like I live in a country full of friends, but rather that I live at arms length from everyone. Sometimes, the hunger takes over, the insecurity ebbs at my attempts at Buddhist detachment and it feels like this is the life of an unloved tranny. Independent, sexually liberated – alone. It feels so easy to confirm the delusion when I feel low. When I feel like I'm at the bottom of the pyramid, I just have to remember all the trans people who are killed, pushed to the side, the lawmakers and the podcasters making their hate so inescapable that it becomes true. Oh yeah, I am worth less than everyone else.
August feels like an ending.
-
By the end of the tour, I understand with a sudden and complete clarity why musicians would want to drink too much, smoke too much, and swallow too many pills. I've been at it for two weeks and I don't understand how anyone can tour like this for months, spend most of their years going like this. 8 hours on planes, trains, and cars, preparing physically and emotionally to stand in front of an audience and read from your diary, put your heart on the line every day, and then do it all again. But, I take my job seriously and do not drink too much, smoke too much, or swallow any pills. I like to read out loud and put on a fun outfit, so it's all worth it. Plus, I think the spell is working. People like the book. People are buying the book.
By the time I'm in the FlyAway bus from LAX to Union Station, I know that I'm drawing from some place deep inside because I feel hollow and yet I have one more stop. It feels like blood magic. Putting in sweat, and pain, and vulnerability into this spell designed to get more people to read my book, drawing from that mysterious core of life inside myself to make something happen because there's definitely not enough food or sleep or zen in there to spare.
Los Angeles feels like the finale of the book tour. I'm going home to Las Vegas in January, sure, but that's more like a homecoming - an encore. ICALA, a big venue, with lots of transfemmes reading their favorite portions of the book. When I'm sitting in the audience, I feel recharged. This is why I love femininity, girlhood, women, I love these artists and writers in their cunty boots and beautiful hair. It feels like the burden of this book finally, finally, finally, doesn't belong to me anymore. It's Page Person's, and Pau Pescador's, and Zachary Drucker's, it belongs to everyone in the audience, it belongs to the world. I feel, finally, free. When I read the last chapter, it feels like a eulogy. Like I've crossed another threshold from girlhood into something new.
There's applause and lots of hugging and I do my best to let it soak in. Then, the museum clears out and we all walk to our cars. We go to a taco place, apparently legendary, that closes a month after we go.
-
I spend my first days back in Chicago sleeping and milling around.
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Sore, depleted, and cold, I take myself to Steamworks. What I need right now is a hot soak, another hot soak, and another hot soak. The fun part about Steamworks is that you get to sit in a jacuzzi and occasionally, an errant hand reaches out to jerk you off. I hit it off with a man from Argentina - floral tattoos, short, golden brown curls, green eyes. We sit for a while near each other and I can't tell if he's sitting near me because the hot tub is full at the moment or if he wants some. I don't break the ice, but instead tap at the surface.
When did you get in? Are you from the city? I like your tattoos.
I move my foot to touch his. I scoot my knee towards his knee, I nudge my pinky onto his pinky. And then, thigh to thigh, elbow to elbow, and then we're making out.
We're making out for a while.
I start to get dizzy and hot and we decide to go to my room. The dry air is tinged with the chemical electricity of VHS cleaner from a room next door and the light from the vintage porn channel washes over my dark little closet. Without the dreamy heat from the jacuzzi, I can tell the erotic energy is a bit deflated. His face is gentle but he's firm. I signal to him that he can be rougher, guiding his hand to my head, nodding when he strikes me here and there. I can tell it turns him on to be rough and we're back at it again, pushing and pulling and choking until he cums and then I cum.
I rest my head against his thigh and laugh. He pulls me in for a hug. I'm surprised by the aftercare – not something I'm used to in the bathhouse where sex starts and ends abruptly, at any point. Where cumming usually transitions to a cordial bro-ing out, a smile, a pat on the shoulder, maybe a Thanks. Instead, I'm hugging the sexy Argentinean visitor and he's giving me a gentle squeeze. It's nice. I shower, I collect my things and see him waiting in line to run a train on some middle aged guy in the public area. He gives me a smile and a wink.
On my way out, the attendant takes my towel and room key and returns my boy passport.
-
I wake up on December 22nd and decide to renew my passport - change my name and gender marker. The boy passport I've been using to get into bathhouses is un-stamped; a mostly useless object that has mostly existed as the relic of an attempt to get into a Danish art school 9 years ago. It dawns on me that if I want a passport, I've gotta do it now or wait 4 (or so...) years to do so. I run around in the pitch black of winter's 3pm, from bank to a currency exchange, to a USPS to print out my application, to a Walgreens for a passport photo, to the Post Office where I have to get in and out of line several times because I keep messing up the parcel. It takes two and a half hours, $220, but I finally send in all the documents.
I'm worried that I've messed it up somehow because it feels too easy for me to have done in one day without a hitch. But, in the first week of January, I get my passport back so that it's up to date with the name and gender I've been using for most of the last decade. Visions of my trips abroad flood me. I feel free, free, free. Maybe they won't let me into the bathhouse anymore, but now my horizons are so much farther. I think of a trip to the Philippines, to Thailand, to Mexico, or France, or Spain, or a casual jaunt up to Canada. I can do that now. I didn't realize that last visit to the bathhouse would be my last visit to the bathhouse as a boy, but I'm glad it was pleasant and that I said goodbye to it with a decent throat-fucking and a hug.
-
A couple days after the inauguration transgender passports seem to be in jeopardy. It's unclear whether or not the country will let you back in once you've left if anything seems fishy with your gender marker. They say they'll confiscate your passport and hold you at border patrol until they can re-issue you a new cisgender passport. Most people say executive orders don't really hold water, legally speaking, but a lot of horrible things happen in state sanctioned ways that are also, legally speaking, illegal. I wonder if I'd spent $220 and half a day on updating my passport just to get myself grounded.
The tone this go around feels different. All of us more hardened, traumatized. All of us seeing what a red presidency did, what a blue presidency did, what a centrist guy named Luigi from Baltimore did.
It was surreal to have spent all of December being celebrated for my weird trans girl book and feels more surreal now, considering the headlines I'm reading. But I'm daring to suggest, daring to believe in a sort of realistic optimism. Lots of holding hands and staring at the abyss. Mutual aid books, articles, go-bags, anger, ideating about buying guns. It feels sort of like being throat fucked and getting a good hug.