74, You Make Me Live

 

Mother always said she could “no way, never” kill herself Only once in her life did she even think about suicide, she said.

About two years after Adam’s death, she realized her period was overdue by a couple of days. Then a couple more. Then more than a week. Finally, she called her mother and announced, “If I had a car, I’d drive it into a brick wall.”

When I came home from a day when I was supposed to’ve been at school, Grandma knew I hadn’t been there. Anticipating my question about mother, she abruptly declared, “She’s tired. She’s resting.” That same tone mother, the lady whose name I never knew and all the other adults in the neighborhood would use to pre-empt a probe.

I could only suppose that I’d had something to do with mother’s fatigue. She would never deny my suspicion, but years later—not long ago, during one of the last times we talked—she said that after seeing what her mother’d gone through and anticipating what I had yet to go through--not to mention her own struggles—she couldn’t bear the thought of bringing someone else into this world, onto this block.

She was younger, much younger than I am now. Still, even today, I see her then as old, or at least older and tireder than I’ve ever been. Or that she was old and tired in ways that I haven’t been, at least not yet.

But there’s still the operation, and whatever will come after it.

Mother’d had an operation. Grandma told me later; then, much later, mother told me she’d had her tubes tied. She probably couldn’t’ve explained it to me because she didn’t want to; when she told me, not long ago, what she’done, she didn’t need to.

As she recalled that time, I remembered the days, the weeks that led up to it: Mother crying that she didn’t know what to do with me, she didn’t know what she would do; she should’ve known this was coming, that it would be so difficult, that her life and mine could only get more difficult.

About the time mother told me this story, I heard about the childhood—if you can call it that—of someone I’d heard about but met only once. She died not long after our meeting.

Lucinda—Lucy—‘d been born in a male body that would get whatever blows her father had left in his fists after punching and slamming his wife into unconsciousness. Lucy’s mother, according to her friends, poured out two glasses of milk laced with rat poison. Before they drank, Lucy’s mother called the police and told them what she was about to do.

Two officers arrived to find Lucy’s mother’s body curled on the peeling tiles of the kitchen floor. Lucy—then known as Christopher—sat near her mother’s head, and clutched her stomach as a grayish-white pool spread around her feet.

After Lucy’d left her father’s beatings for the sullen streets and rotting piers near the city’s most (in)famous red-light district, cops fished the long, dark body of Evangeline, her first lover, from the water just off the piers she worked.

Lucy talked long and loud, without rage, until someone mentioned the coroner’s report on Evangeline. “Fuckin’ bullshit, “ she hissed. “No-body around me kuh-mits soo-ih-side. Noo-body!”

I’d been thinking about—no, envisioning—offing myself the day before, as I had nearly every day back then. I had no place to stay, no money and, it seemed, no way to make any. I wasn’t so pretty to begin with, and I was getting older, old—at least for that world. The hormones had begun to do their work, so I wasn’t getting any erections. But my penis was still there, and my ass and waist were still just about the same size.

Still, I could pass, most of the time—probably because I was fortunate enough not to have an Adam’s Apple. But I wondered how long I’d keep that up. Even though women weren’t doing double-takes when I used their bathrooms, some men did when I walked out the door.

I realize now that perhaps I didn’t have any friends, that maybe I never did. But still, it hurts as much—perhaps even more—when you can’t even hold onto the illusion of friendship. Or of love. I’d already lost Vivian when she thought I’d become too much of a girl. Lost Marabeth, too. And ,it seemed, the only ones who noticed, much less wanted, me were men I’d see at night.

You know you’re not just a recreational cross-dresser when you need to come out during the day, as the woman you are. When going to work—whatever it is—or to the store, to lunch, anyplace as someone other than the one as whom you identify becomes a crushing, deadening load. Even the air you inhale doesn’t enter your own lungs: It disappears down the neck of a cave into a hollow you’ll never see.

70. Forgetting

 

Probably nobody has ever remembered any event or person, or even object, completely. What I’ve never understood is why anybody tried.

What I understand even less is when people try to make a scene, recollection or piece of furniture seem older and more enshrouded in a gauze of mist than it already is. Or all those commercials that were shot in grainy black-and-white when film, video and any number of other could reproduce and store the colors paraded in front of them. Why cloud up a clear vision of a day? Why make houses and the things in them seem even more weathered than they actually are?

Mother never talked about the past—hers or anyone else’s. Not even mine. But it seemed that everyone, except her and Adam, who spent more than five minutes with me tried to get me to talk about what was gone, what they could never experience.

Or they tried to wipe out my recall: something they could no more do than to remember their own lives. We’ve all had doctors who told us the needles they stuck in our arms didn’t hurt, or teachers or other adults who told us we weren’t hurt after some bully—or the adult in question—punched, kicked or shoved us.

The result—at least for me—was always the same when any adult condescended or simply lied: contempt, on both sides. Likewise for anyone who tries to blur an already blurry picture. Even the ones who really believe they’re trying to ease my pain, in the end, earn my anger because they’re trying to blunt the edge of my recollections.

By the same token, I don’t try to recall everything, everybody, every moment. Even if I could, I couldn’t keep them, just as I can’t take every article of clothing I’ve ever worn with me. It’s one of the first lessons you learn when you can’t stay some place.

And the moment you begin to move, from necessity, the faces, the voices, the pieces of a house, all disappear into a blur. Or they lie submerged, bubbling through the cauldron of your dreams you don’t remember in the morning.

67, Memory of a Season

 

It still amazes me how little’s changed here. Sure, the only people remaining from the block as I knew it are in this room now. If you’re one of those people who believes that any neighborhood is its people, then you’d think that the place I knew ceased to exist long ago, perhaps when I left this block. You’d be right, in a way, I guess.

When I think of change, I’m not thinking about which houses have disappeared and which ones have been built, or what stores opened and closed, or what kinds of cars are parked around here. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall many of the places, at least not exactly. I’m not completely sure—except for the house where Adam lived and the one where mother and I stayed—which ones were here and which weren’t. Maybe it’s just as well: I’ve never had attachments to rooms, furnishings or architectural details. Good thing, too: When you have to move from one place to another as often as I have, sentimental attachments are the spindly heels that can break under you as you step up onto a curb.

But then there’s something else I recognized as soon as I got here. Some may call it a “feeling in the air.” It has to do with the light, which is the only thing that truly defines any place. No matter where I’ve woken, I’ve always known where I was—or, at least, where I wasn’t—by the light of the place.

The light on this block, even though it changes through seasons, cannot be mistaken for any other. The kind I recall most clearly seems to’ve begun today, or within the past few days. The sky is overcast, but the air is not completely gray: It’s been tinged by shingles and painted wood that’ve just begun to show splinters that were hidden by summer shadows. The day is also tinged with flecks of rust escaping from crumbling bricks.

In other places, they call the season with this light “autumn,” and it’s pretty. Here, it’s fall and it’s not melancholy, not sad. It just is, and everybody knows that winter—with or without snow—follows. And the gray, the white, will fill the street, the alleyways and ground between the houses like ash. When it clears away, some of the people—the women—you saw during the fall will sit on stoops, or scrape and poke little patches of ground around their houses. And sunlight will glare off pores of skin—faces, then arms and sometimes legs—newly uncovered. For what seems a brief moment, the faded paint and flaking bricks fill your eyes with echoes of colors struggling to rise from gaps of soil between slabs of concrete.

This cycle of light, my most vivid recollection, is now the only reason I could ever have to return to this block after mother’s gone. And I’m sure it’ll never change.

66. For Them

 

Weddings were always for other people. Just like graduations, or any prize I’d heard about. They handed kids diplomas in the schools we attended, but I don’t remember anybody I know getting one. And the ones who exchanged vows—they always came from someplace else, away from this block. And we never saw them again.

Other people. For all I know, mother’d never been married. Or maybe she was never not-married. Not until I got away from this block did I realize that kids learn, at some time or another, their parents were children who probably didn’t know each other. Then there was the ceremony like the ones I used to see in church. For one brief moment, they were as clear, as unambiguous, as black and white—because they bathed in the glow of whatever color of glass was struck by that day’s light. That hue would tinge whatever pictures people carried with them—even after the marriage dissolved—like the sepia in old photographs.

Mother never talked about whoever fathered me, much less about whatever circumstances brought them together, or how they came apart. Or, for that matter, if they were ever really together in the first place. Or, for that matter, where—much less how—she came to have me by him.

Other people got married. Other people had children. The kids on this block are like the houses, the church, the stores on the avenue—they are always in a moment, one that extends from the first to the last anybody can recall. They’re always there; nobody knows who or what was there before them; nobody remembers when they’re gone. And nobody sees them graduating or getting married: If they do those things, they’re somewhere else.

But the funerals…Mother, now. The man who got my former name when they found his body in the basement. Sammy and Don—two men I called “uncle” until they ended up in caskets that weren’t opened while I was at their funerals. Anthony Giordano, who volunteered for the Navy because he knew he was going to get drafted, who came home in a body bag. David Held, who was drafted. And—I know I’m jumping back and forth in time, whatever that is—Jimmy McCulley, who, it was said, “fell off the pier”—so close to this block, though I’ve never seen it—where his uncle used to unload boats. Freddy du Maars—all I ever heard was that he “fell.”

And, of course, Adam. From him to mother, death was always somebody I knew well—or at least as anybody I’ve known since. Except for the man in the cellar, I felt sorrow for them but I could’ve felt even more than I did if I hadn’t felt relief—and yes, I admit, envious—that they were finally out of that endless moment we all occupied. For Adam, and now for Mother, my sense of relief is heightened because they were—are—at least to my knowledge—no longer suffering on this block.

Death happened to them: the only two people, I believe, with whom I’ve ever truly empathized. Other people—if I could in any way relate to or care about their experiences—I could only imagine, or just think about, whatever pain they might’ve conveyed in my direction.

I’ve been to other funerals since I left this block. For a while, it seemed that every week someone I met in a bar or on the street died of AIDS or was shot or beaten to death. I went to their funerals whenever I could, not because I thought it would change anything, but because of something Mother taught me: You give respect to people whether or not they know you’re giving it. If she’s right—and nothing I’ve seen tells me she isn’t—then respect is all you can give the dead if you’re going to give them anything at all.

For that alone, she deserves my respect. And of course for many other reasons, the first of which is that she did something I’ll never do—not even after the surgery: She gave birth. To me.

65. Too Late For Laments

 

Soon I will no longer have any need, or reason, to feel shame or to apologize. I can’t recall mother having done either, or that she ever expected one or the other of me. When I was a child, some kids stole other kids’ bikes or jackets, insulted each other by questioning each other’s sexuality or practices, or damaged or destroyed property. I did none of those things, although they were done to me. Certainly that didn’t make me any more moral than, or superior to, anyone else.

I realize now that you only learn about shame and contrition when you’ve had to express them yourself. The only such experience I had growing up was having to say something called “The Act of Contrition” during mass. I didn’t understand it, even after I looked up the word “contrition,” probably because it made no sense for me—or anyone, really—to say it. Even at such a young age, I realized how silly it was, and how it was even sillier to talk to someone who wasn’t there, especially if someone told you he was there but couldn’t tell you where, much less how or why.

For that matter, all apologies now seem absurd—now there’s a word I wish I’d known then!—in the way that alarms installed after a burglary seem pointless and useless. The deed is done; the doer is gone—mentally, if not physically. He’s gone on to other things, unless of course he’s rationalizing or gloating over what he’s done. In which case he isn’t going to apologize anyway.

Even if I’d given that man a chance to acknowledge his rape of me, it wouldn’t’ve changed him, or me, or anything. You could even say that if he could or would see how he’d violated me, he wouldn’t’ve said he was sorry. I wonder now whether that’s what mother thought.

And so it wouldn’t’ve made any sense, or changed anything, if I’d apologized for having retaliated—had I done such a thing—in the moment after he attacked me, or in the future. Beating, mutilating, killing him wouldn’t’ve been acts of rage, an emotion that precludes—some say precedes, but I don’t see how—sorrow.

Mother never expected apologies from me, even though nothing I’ve done, nothing I’ve become, justifies the difficulties I caused her. I’ll never know—though I can guess accurately, I think—whether she’d wanted or planned for me. Not that she ever implied, even in anger, that I constricted her life, as other parents have told children who became some of the people I’ve met since I left this block. Vivian’s father always reminded her of his abandoned ambitions toward a musical career, or that he’d played drums behind guitarists and singers whose records kids—and sometimes their parents—in my generation, even on my block, bought and listened to. Maybe mother had no such aspirations, simply because she didn’t have time to have them. But if she’d had dreams, I never heard about them.

It’s no surprise, I guess, that she never even made me apologize for not having aspirations of my own. For one thing, I was never sure I’d grow up to realize them. In fact, I was sure I wouldn’t live long enough, or that if I did I’d end up in jail or a mental hospital. That’s what happened to the young men here—or else they simply disappeared. Even if I survived to seventeen, eighteen years old on this block, I’d had no idea how I’d finish high school, much less go to college. Not that I’d want either one. School, for me, was always just a place where I was prey and supposed to get used to it. And expect no apologies, no expressions of shame from anyone.

Not that I would’ve expected anything from the other kids—mostly boys—or the teachers, the principal or anybody else. Kids beat up other kids in the hope that someone else wouldn’t beat them. They won fights, games, competitions—none of which mattered away from school, much less this block—so they wouldn’t have to experience defeat for the moment, a day or—they hoped—forever. They did what they did—just as I lied, stole, sold my body and killed—and offered no apologies or explanations for the same reasons I didn’t, mother didn’t, why nobody on this block did. You don’t—or perhaps you can’t—justify anything you do to survive, to make it from one moment to the next. Some people—we often hear about them in the news—may try to offer an expression of contrition, an acceptance of responsibility, for their deeds or those of their parents, long after they’re done. But they’re not lamenting the deeds themselves: Usually, they’re ruing some outcome of it. Like that scientist who said “I have become death!”-- or something like that-- long after he and his colleagues exploded the first atomic bomb.

63. The Price

 

All of my life, I’ve respected only one man: Adam. I recall him whenever I’m in the presence of anybody who’s just died, or when I hear about any death that matters to me.

Death is death. Vivian told me that, I think. She’s probably right, although I don’t know how she’d’ve known. We all become the same minerals; we feed worms, fish or some other scavengers when we’re dead. And in the end, I guess it doesn’t matter whether we’ve enabled a swimmer, crawler or flyer to continue living. It probably doesn’t even matter whether we’re interred whole, or buried or submerged in the ocean. There’s not much difference, really, except that the sad people—he ones born into grief and burdened with sorrow—always seem to want their corpses immolated.

After Adam died—was murdered—an intense heat—one that covered or at least occupied and filled—a hollow within—and I’m not just talking about a mere physical “inside of”—me. Mother often scolded me for leaving the house in the dead of winter without my coat. “But I’m too hot!” She insisted, demanded—but to my recollection, never threatened. And I’d wear my coat for as long as I could stand it or until mother was out of sight.

That feeling—heat coursing through me, as if from a fire no one notices because it’s deep in the ground—pushed up through my pores whenever someone I knew died from AIDS or was driven to that act the police and others conveniently classified as “suicide.”

There was none of that after the cops found the body to which they gave my former name. The cops called that one a murder—case closed. And no doubt it was, at least in the way they understand it. But he was not Adam; he was no Adam.

As I am not.

As for mother, the heat is rising, closer to the surface. It has nothing to do with the temperature of the room in which her body has been laid out: The other attendees—both of them—are wearing sweaters over their black dresses. I took off my jacket but I still feel beads of sweat forming just below my neck. Getting hotter; I don’t want the heat to consume me. Oh, if only there were a pool, or even a bathtub, here! The ocean’s only a couple of miles away. But I’ve never gotten to it from this block and have no idea of how to do that. I know the ocean’s there—at least I’ve always accepted it as some sort of knowledge—from the maps I saw when I was in school. Mother’d never’ve been any help on this one: She never went to the ocean, either.

I don’t know that Adam did, either. I’m not even sure he ever left that stoop, except to go in the house. He wasn’t like all the other men I’ve known—at least the ones I recall—who always seem to have the need to go some place or another, even if they’re always going to the same places. If they came back, they’d lie about what they’d done and where they’d been. They’d slept with everybody, or nobody. They didn’t have to pay for it, or they could afford whatever they wanted. Loved and spat upon, conquering fear yet with fear all the time. No need; they can’t do without. The same stuff, everywhere I’ve gone.

Except from Adam. He’s the only person I’ve known—except for mother, and then only after I left this block—who could give me something without demanding something else from me; who didn’t abandon or betray me when I made choices because I had no choice but to make them. He accepted shyness swaddled in 11-year-old baby fat; she never questioned me about the transformation I’m making, the next stage of which she won’t see.

Nor, for that matter, will the other two women in this room. Does the woman whose name I never knew realize who she’s seeing? She glances my way again; I see her squints and stares. Eyes like hers can’t hide furtiveness, which is to say attempts at stealth. They seem gray, lifeless, to anyone who sees her only for a moment. Any more than that, and you can see her color-- not quite blue or hazel or any other hue you’ve seen before—registering, it seems, tones and volumes pulsing from your blood, your bones or something else you don’t see when she sees you.

At that moment, it seems, she decides whether or not she decides to speak to you. Today, for the first time, I caught her indecision and uncertainty. When I lived on this block, I knew she’d never speak to me. Or to that man who used to come around to fight with mother. She never spoke to Mrs. Littington, and I doubt that she will today.

She’s looking my way again.

I never saw her speak to Adam: She never seemed to leave her house; nor did he leave his. But here she is, with mother and Mrs. Littington.

And him.

Out of respect for mother. For the ones she knew, with whom she shared coffee or roasted chickens, for whoever ate the drumsticks and wings. But not the necks. I still haven’t tried them. Mother never would’ve allowed that. For the boy she raised, from whom she kept his father, at least for as long as she could.

At least I never had to pretend I belonged to him. In fact, I’ve never had to respect him or any other man, so I never did. Except for Adam. He’s probably the only man I ever met, to this day, who could offer me a simple pleasure without obligations, without entanglements. He offered nothing more than those five-ounce bottles of soda and, when the mood suited him—or me—a conversation, sometimes a story.

Too bad about the way he died. But he’s still the only man who, to my knowledge, didn’t kill or inflict some other sort of violence on another person. I don’t know what he did before he got to this block, or at least whether he got to live because someone else didn’t. But, at least for the time he lived here, he didn’t kill or maim, or cause the death of anyone else.

Though bottles of soda are valuable currency in the world of children, he never extorted promises or confessions with them. Usually, when a man pays for something, he thinks it’s subject solely to his whims, his impulses. Don’t ever let a man pay for you; otherwise, you owe him. If he knows he’s going to see you again, he might wait. But if he’s in your life for an hour, he’ll take whatever he can get. If he pays for dinner, he’ll take the night from you. If he pays for your body, he thinks he can beat you. The only question is whether he’ll do it before or after he fucks you.

My stories weren’t so different from those of the girls who walked the streets. None will ever tell you of an encounter with a man like Adam.

On this block, nobody would ever speak of him.