49. Bodies

Two of the main streets that enclose this block—a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Ocean.” Three thoroughfares—a Boulevard as well as a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Bay.” And there are still other streets with “Ocean” or “Bay” in their names. Oh, and I mustn’t forget about the other streets that share their names with bodies of water that are found nowhere near this block.

I never connected the words “bay” or “ocean” with great basins of salt water. I still don’t, even though I finally got to taste the surf after I left this block. “Ocean” signified tides and winds only because some books, which I had to read for school, represented it that way. The same for “bay” and mirrors of moonlight rippled by breezes: that is how the books depicted such bodies of water. With Vivian, I hadn’t gone to the ocean; I’d gone to the beach and a town—a village, really—splintered like driftwood.

Where Bay meets Ocean, they couldn’t bury Adam. For some reason—the way he died, I was told—he wasn’t allowed into the Jewish cemetery there, at Bay and Ocean. He couldn’t be buried there—that’s what I’ve heard ever since. No one said he wouldn’t bury Adam there, only that he couldn’t be interred there.

He also couldn’t be buried in the other cemetery near this block, at Atlantic and Bay Bridge: It was Catholic; they wouldn’t have taken him either. One of the nuns—no, wait, it was a priest, who instructed me in I-forget-what before we made Confirmation—told us that the ground itself couldn’t take him, wouldn’t keep him, because it was sanctified, which was a fancy way of saying holy, which meant that they couldn’t keep him buried there.

Father—I forget his name—said it was because Adam killed himself. Same thing the rabbi said. Of course, neither of them talked to me or any of the other kids about him. We’d just heard what they said about him later on, one kid from another, though none of us knew who spoke first.

So they couldn’t bury Adam at Bay and Ocean or Atlantic and Bay Bridge because, they said, he’d killed himself. He couldn’t stay submerged like the bodies tossed by their killers at the beginning of winter. Those bodies stayed down, under the cunningly calm, cold surface, until the undercurrents warmed and lifted all things that wouldn’t wake for long, warm mornings to the light above the water.

When you grow up on this block, you learn at least this much: People don’t, by accident, end up at or in the water when they die. They’re always tossed, thrown, pushed, shoved or dropped in. Or, if they get to the water on their own, they die only after they’re held under, by themselves or somebody else.

I’ve never believed for a moment—oh, forget that, I’ve always known—that Adam’s death wasn’t what the priest, rabbi or everyone else on this block called it: a suicide. Whenever people from this block used that word in connection with Adam, they shifted their eyes from me and the word escaped from them, as if they’d sidestepped their own voices. And their echoes would drift away from that word,, creeping along like a ship that’s left its dock before its scheduled time and is slipping into fog.

40-A. Her

Still wonder about that lady, the one whose name I never knew, the one whose voice I heard only once before the funeral. Did she recognize me? Now I’m remembering something else. The day before the funeral, when I walked through the graveyards that separate this block, this neighborhood, from every other place I’ve seen since living on it, the wind—at least I thought it was the wind—flickered across my face and the back of my hands, which I shaved every day at that point in my life. I felt my blood fluttering under my skin and another current of wind rushing over my pores. But—no tingles, no goosebumps—I realized the air was still and the sun, behind translucent clouds and the chill of headstones against my fingertips seemed still, almost neutral.

When I walked under the bronze cross at the top of the gate, she glanced from across the street, a few yards to my left. I hadn’t remembered, at that moment, that she was our old neighbor, but I exhaled fully, wholly, when the step I thought she took in my direction cut to her left and toward a house on the corner.

Didn’t occur to me that it was her—or that she was looking at me—until long after the funeral, after I ‘d left the block for the last time. She’s probably still there, for all I know.

30. Memories and Those Who Stayed

There’s very little—and very few people—I actually miss. Sometimes it seems that I had no choice, that if I tried to hold on to any part of my life—much less anyone else’s—I’d die, though not from the effort. I’ve always guessed that it’d be something like drowning: It’s not the work you put into getting in over your head that destroys you; it’s the stuff that you’re in that’s submerged you.

I haven’t tried to remember, or hold on to, mother. It seemed that no matter where I was, she was always on the other end of the line. Now, that’s not so benevolent, as I’ve seen, as I’ll probably see again and again. I don’t think I could not’ve spoken to her as I did, just about every week. Over time, I stopped visualizing the woman who stayed on this block because that was all she could do for me after I left.

This isn’t to say I didn’t need her or she didn’t need me. To the contrary: We were—still are—the only constant in each other’s lives. Or in her death. Will that change? After all, she won’t be there when I die, when my body ends up wherever it does. As far as I know, I don’t have a soul or anything that transcends my own bones. I never did tell that to mother: Even after all I’ve described, I still wasn’t about to break her heart—or that of any other living person—unnecessarily.

Soon she will be buried—just like everyone else who dies on this block, including Adam—and then what? I don’t know where she’ll end up in my mind, in my recollections, much less in the chaos of the cosmos.

I think about the what-next mainly because that’s what she would’ve wanted me to do. Will I think about her wishes, desires, ten, twenty years from now—if I’m around that long—if I survive the operation? Will it matter? As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s thought about Adam for a very, very long time. I must say, though, that I have no wish to bring him back. Even when I was young, just after he’d died—been murdered, really, just like every other man on this block who stayed—I felt this way.

Maybe mother thought of him, or more precisely, thought back to him. And what does it matter now? Maybe she’s taking some image of this place—of the light that didn’t fill rooms or spaces of any kind, that ended but never quite brightened or reflected colors, like the glass panes inside the front doors of some houses.

All those days in the shadows and in bound, muted illumination, passing one after another like all things never heard because they’ve repeated the same dull and pointlessly violent echoes you hear when you pass through some place you’re bound to return to because you don’t know that you are. Sounds, words used to muffle a scream, a shout of anger, murmur like rumbles buried deep In the ground and return to the surface when you stay on this block, wherever you are. And when the sun visits, shadows spread across windows and open eyes.

And so Vivian gave me one of the few, if not the first, of the experiences I would miss, that I miss now: an autumn afternoon, not much different from this one, maybe chillier or more brisk because we in those flat, open and, at this time of year, deserted areas around the beaches. There was no place where you couldn’t feel the late October sunlight, rippled and whipped across water, sand, rock and splintered wood, as it turned to wind. The young, oiled bodies were long gone. Vivian’s car, like the others, rattled along the sand-swirled road but never stopped or hesitated.

The people—especially the men—seemed as if they’d been there forever and would always be there, their days stretching ahead and sometimes around them, even they knew they would end, perhaps that winter or the one after it. They, like Vivian’s father, had been left there; the tide would not take them back out even if they’d flung themselves into it. They’d come ashore from everywhere in the times before mine, before Vivian’s: the wars, the wars from which they’d escaped; they came, the onetime surfers and musicians.

One man, who’d been fixing fishing rods and making shell and pebble bracelets for as long as Vivian’s father could recall, said he survived his first twenty-seven winters on codfish, potatoes and beer. In the summer, there were lobsters and farmers offered up corn and fruits; in the fall, the women baked pies. And she was the first to bake one—cherry, my favorite (I hate pumpkin!)—for me.

21. The Seasons

That first sunny day, after the wind drew away the blanket of clouds that clung to the sky—twisting and tangling it with gray air reflecting the sullen sea and listless, dessicated leaves—filled me with the same fear, the same dread, I’d later feel when I thought mother was going to ask me when I was coming to see her. Sunlight fell and glinted like sleet striking glaciers of mirrors.

Even at such a young age, I could see that the sunlight—and the sun itself—weren’t the same ones that lit the previous November like a dream. The previous year’s light had already faded and dissipated into particles of green, yellow and the colors of bricks that disappeared from view any time I tried to explain them. Perhaps I’ve been fortunate for not having any illusions, ever, that I’m an artist of any sort. Some people think that anyone who gets away from this block, or from any of those other places that consume the youth of anybody who’s had to sleep in them, is a survivor. But I digress—I’ve left only because I could run, even if only for a time in my life. Even if I weren’t going through the transition I’ll soon culminate, I’d never be able to run that fast, for that long, again. Age has something to do with it, and so do the hormones. But I think—hope—the real reason is that I won’t have to run like that again.

But on that day I was describing, there was only raw, naked sunlight—not sunshine. And the cold. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I couldn’t believe the barren trees couldn’t feel it. Perhaps everyone’s born into it; that’s why mothers swaddle their babies everywhere in the world, even in climates that resemble the womb. I don’t know whether I was born into that light—I suspect I was. I know for a fact –at least from the most reliable sources I know—that two of my cousins (the ones I know about, anyway) were born in different years but in the same final autumnal shroud just before it was torn away by glinting, glittering cold.

One came just before the first graying of November—the last man related to me, as far as I knew. The other I’ve never met: He died on some nameless hill fighting in a country nobody on this block ever thinks about. (At least the women don’t, anyway.) When he was born, somebody—my grandmother, the doctor and my great-aunt say it was one of the others—declared him “not long for this world.” Which was strange because he wasn’t sickly: In fact, he was a larger and hungrier baby than any other born to this block—or so I’ve heard. I’ve also heard that his father—I never met him, either—said that on that day, he knew it was going to be a long, cold winter and there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it.

From that year, when I first understood the middle of November (Now I know what Gertrude Stein meant when she said T.S. Eliot “looked like the fifteenth of November.”) I stopped remembering my dreams, except on very rare occasions. I also realized, then, that from that time of year until the spring I wouldn’t see Adam sitting on his stoop again. No one seemed to know what he did. Apparently, he stayed in the house, but nobody knew whether he slept, read books, drank or did some combination of those and other things. Whatever he did, it was hard to blame him: If this sun was too bright for my eyes, I couldn’t imagine how it affected him.

It’s hard to see how he couldn’t’ve been born at this time of year, into gray chill followed by blindingly clear cold. I’d’ve come to such a conclusion even if I hadn’t known his birthdate: what people in America call Veteran’s Day; what others call Armistice Day. On this block, it was probably just another day, just like any other—that’s how it was every year I can remember.

And the day he escaped from the concentration camp: As best he could tell, it was his 24^th birthday. In those shadowy windowless chambers he’d lost track of day and night. It was only much later, when he tried to retrace the march of his days, that he concluded it must’ve been his anniversary, as he called it, or close to it.

He ran, across a frozen river, under the moon. It was the moon; he never mentioned “moon light.” The cold, and the moon—and the wind: They were his only guides as he ran in what he believed to be a direction away from the camp, away from the German Army. After hours—or so they seemed—a truck pulled up alongside him. “Get in!” The voice was in English.

He jumped onto the hay-bale and wheels lurched and rocked him along a road. The same voice later yelled, “Get out!” and soon after he did, the truck disappeared.

Fighting his own reluctance, he walked across a field of frost crystals to a half-timbered house. Inside, about fifteen men in different uniforms clustered around a fire. He didn’t follow the chatter, not only because he couldn’t understand whatever language(s) they spoke: their gathering had the quality of furtive cameraderie forged among people stranded in the same place by different circumstances.

He thought about jumping through the window, back out into the cold. But then he realized that at least two of the men were Americans and that two others, whatever they were, sided with la Resistance. But the realization that he could stay, at least for a while, frightened him almost as much as the thought that those same men could’ve been spies-in-waiting.

Poets love autumn in places like the mountains that surrounded that house. That season fits, almost perfectly, the definition of “melancholy”: a beautiful, gentle—or at least not violent—sadness. But the last flowers lose their grasp on the hillside; the silver air turns gray and the brutal, endless winter begins.

When the absence of the sun’s warmth accompanies an abundance of its light, colors disappear. Or at least one stops seeing them: they, without the filter of haze, seem to disappear; so do the sweet fruits and richly bitter vegetables. For months, he said, they lived on squirrels they shot from the windows and dark, coarse peasant bread.

When he’d gotten to that house, he’d had no clothes but the prison uniform he’d worn since the day he escaped. The soldiers gave him cammoflage shirts, wool parachuter’s pants, socks—whatever they could drag up. They were all thicker and heavier than the striped shirt and pants from the camp, but he still felt cold, no matter how long he sat by the fire. Nobody pushed him aside, but he knew that sometimes he had to give the soldiers his space—by agreement, that’s what it was—because only half of them could sit by it at any given time.

It amazed me—but not him—that nobody came looking for him. In fact, no battalions, not even any individual soldiers, marched through that village for almost five months.

But the river he crossed melted; buds opened blood-red and the air filled with haze. Eventually, there were berries and other fruits, but neither he nor the other men could stay and eat them.

18. What We Had To Do

When I left, I wasn’t dreaming of summer skies and warmer weather. Not about mountains, or long wide boulevards from fountain-washed plazas to glistening colonnades and arches inside circles of torches and horns. I didn’t envision ancient temples thrust into the light of day after thousands, millions, of nights under volcanic earth. I’d had some idea I might follow a river, but I really didn’t know how or where I’d do that because the only river I’d seen bubbled suds beyond fences and highway overpasses at the far end of the city in which this block is located. That didn’t count. Nor did the creek that belched oily fumes between the state in which this block is located and the next one.

I’d follow some stream, perhaps—past what? I woudn’t’ve known a forest, a desert or anybody’s countryside if I’d been dropped into it. I couldn’t’ve even imagined such things; I guess I wasn’t paying attention during the little time I spent in geography lessons. Couldn’t see much reason to—after all, how did anybody expect me to learn about things I hadn’t seen from other people who hadn’t seen them? Plus, I always figured, even after I knew I was leaving, that no place could be that much more interesting than this block. And certainly not any better.

So I never dreamed about the sights—and certainly not the smells—of any place else. I didn’t dream about anything in California, partly because I had practically no idea—apart from a bridge I’d probably never cross just like the one at the far end of this city, except the one in California was painted orange. And why would I want to go to a place with an orange bridge, anyway?

It wasn’t just my ignorance about anything away from this block. I couldn’t, I still can’t imagine any of it. I’ve seen some things and I remember a few places and even fewer people. But I still don’t try to extrapolate from what I’ve seen to what I haven’t. In fact, I’m still not curious about those other parts of the world that have passed before my eyes since I left this block. Getting to the places I’ve gone was simply a result, a consequence, of having left this block. All that I think about—Mother, you taught me well!—is a place to stay and something to eat. Relationships, whether physical or emotional, have usually been things I’d stumbled over and occasionally did for a bed and a meal, and sometimes even money.

The first time I turned a trick, I can’t remember whether I’d done it to eat or sleep, or whether I was hungry or tired enough to want either one. Somehow I knew I’d do it, sometime, somewhere. Wanted to make a promise not to, but couldn’t. Who would I’ve made such a promise to, anyway? Mothers? The nuns? The teachers? No, I couldn’t let any of them know I’d been thinking such a thing. The only others remaining were the other boys in the school, all of whom seemed younger, bigger and tougher than me.

Now, it seems silly to make such promises, or almost any other kind, for that matter. I realize now that I wasn’t repulsed by the idea of giving my only possession—my body—to anyone else for a period of time for cash or any other currency that would’ve been useful to me. No, that’s not all of it, either. It wasn’t even that I found the idea of sucking a guy’s cock, or letting him stick it up my ass, any more awful than any other carnal act—mainly because I didn’t know any others at the time.

It was the body—their bodies, the thought of them—that filled me with nausea. Their skin, their hair—even his, showered and lotioned—rasped against the inside of my mouth like cinders and dust. Like the ones I knew on this block, the ones who pretended not to know about the things they’d done to me. And who swore death unto anyone who’d do it to them.

Their bodies, his body, made me sick at first. Then angry—as if I were just barely suppressing my wish that my teeth could be a guillotine when his cock was between them. One night—I don’t remember when—I got past, if not over, that impulse. Then I believe the act became what I did, done for the same reason most people do what they do for a living: because it was what I knew how to do, however well or poorly. It’s true: I didn’t know how to do much else, not with my education or lack of it, or more precisely, lack of credentials. Mother’d taught me how to cook a few dishes, but somehow it never occurred to me to make them for anyone else. Actually, you can’t cook when you’re trying to forget the place you came from or to make it forget you. You can prepare foods; you can put them in front of somebody. But you can’t really feed people, much less satisfy them.

When you offer—when you can offer—no more than your body, or parts of it, and someone’s willing to pay, there’s really nothing else they can take from you. Offer it—offer the bodies you’ve known, as you’ve known them, and all anybody can do is take them and pay. Having lived, and nearly died, on this block, I could never relate to men in any other way.

Even Adam. He never touched me, much less fondled me. But , other than the presence of my body, what else could I, who hadn’t yet developed acne, offer a man who could no more remove the number tatooed on his forearm than he could erase his name from his birth certificate, if it still existed. After him, I never wanted to ask any man—anybody, really—his story. He once said, “They ask what you do. You tell; maybe they shoot, maybe keep you.” Sometimes, he said, they even feed you.

And what had he done. He said something about being a “doctor for the eyes.” Or maybe he’d been studying that—after all, he was old, not much older than I was when I left this block—when he was grabbed on a street in Cracow.

He’d never tried to describe that city—“It’s gone now, finished”—or the place where the soldiers brought him. He only said, “They made me doctor eyes.” Doctor eyes—I never asked what he meant, or even tried to imagine. I knew only, “Some braahn, some blue.” Whichever, he said, “I doctor.”

I never did find out which camp, or other place of internment, he’d seen. Or where he passed through, camped out or simply ran. He’d talk only about the wind through the trees—you couldn’t escape it, he said—and a river that smelled of sulfur, “like a match burnt,” even though it’d frozen enough for him to run across. The hollow and hidden places he found, each of them good for a night, sometimes two. Abandoned, like everything else, at the first echo, the first scent of another person. “The city, the country, no matter,” he told me. “All dangerous.”

Once I asked about whether he’d thought about going back to Poland or any of those other places. He shook his hand in front of my face as if he’d been diabetic and I’d offered him fudge. “All done. No more.”

He never talked about marriage—having been, having not been, or even whether he’d considered it. As far as I know, he didn’t have any children. At least, I can no more imagine his having had them than I could see myself becoming a boy again. It wouldn’t be possible now even if God wants it—supposing, of course, that God exists, notwithstanding the human race’s attempts to create –and some people’s wishes to get rid of—him.

I never imagined that God, much less all those things I hadn’t yet experienced and would never imagine, would’ve changed me, changed the directions—whatever they’ve been—of my life. All I know, all I’ve ever known, was that if I’d stayed I’d’ve died a boy, of whatever age, just like the others on this block. The only way, as best as I could tell, to forestall my own death in boyhood—I wasn’t even thinking of what I’d survive into—was to kill. Yes, kill: before I’d have possession of my body—my life—taken from me.

I suppose that if I’d escaped and remained the boy I’d been—of course, it wouldn’t’ve been possible, but let’s say “if “ anyway—I’d’ve said I’d done “what I had to do.” They say that all the time. But the truth is that I was no more obligated to anybody to survive, whether I remained on this block or somewhere else, than I was to die here. Adam was gone. Even if he weren’t, nothing I could’ve done would’ve helped him. Mother’d done everything she could without selling her body—at least, as far as I know, she never did.

And, once I left, she never asked me to call, and I never promised I would: I think she knew I would. Partly out of respect, but also because I could and would do so. She’d never want to know the name of the city or country I was calling from, or whether the weather and scenery were pleasing. Only that I’d had a place to sleep and enough to eat.

8. Passages

When I saw those women again, I’d thought they were the only ones who survived this block. As far as I know, none was still living there, at least physically, when we came to see my mother for the last time. Of course I knew Mrs. Littington had gone years before. But the others, I’d just assumed they’d left.

And, at least for a time, it confirmed what I’d always suspected: only women survive. And that, in the end, mothers don’t have much more than their daughters and females—no matter how bitterly one may fight the other—have only each other. Nobody and nothing else—including this block—survives. Or so I came to conclude.

Later I believed, briefly, that there were exceptions, contradictions—including me. Sometimes it’s said that the exception proves the rule, or more precisely, that the contradiction confirms the theory.

My own experiences, though, led me to revise what I thought was a truism. Most of, if not all, of the survivors are female. They’ve got the Y chromosome, or some equivalent to it, somewhere in their bones. The bones—the only part of the universe you can’t escape. The scientists may unravel the helix, the spiral that twines the uterus, the intestines, all the visceral matter, together. But the things that can’t be changed are still woven and bound, still bred, in the bones.

Even when you’re really young, your bones ache when you’re trying to do something they just weren’t made to do. Sometimes those tasks can even break that latticework—Just ask any tiny, skinny boy whose father, uncle or older brother prodded him into playing football.

So yes, there are two genders on this block, just as there are anywhere else. But, just as important as the biophysical division of the species is the divide between those two zones of life on this block. I suppose that it exists in other places, too, but I first noticed it on this block: It seems that you’re either in the kitchen or on the streets.

Most of the boys end up on the streets. They live long enough to leave another boy behind for another boy to take in or mold. One day, when you’re a boy, someone teaches you how to raise and swing your fists, if you haven’t learned it on your own. Someone else shows you (again, if you didn’t pick it up) the walk: head slightly back, chest ahead, arms firmly at sides. Somehow it seems to take up the width of the sidewalk and others step aside—or challenge you. There’re other things, too, that they teach you in the name of “becoming a man.” And—oh yeah—there’s always the first drink, the first smoke, the first rape. Nobody calls it that, of course. It’s not a violation if you do it in some other neighborhood, to someone who’s not the sister of anybody you know.

But my mother, my grandmother and their friends—they knew my nature. They always started to cook meals right about when some uncle or cousin wanted to take me outside. Garlic had to be pressed, onions chopped, tomatoes sliced. Later there would be soups to simmer and pasta to boil.

I didn’t mind doing those culinary basics—I was going to say “grunt work,” but in a kitchen all tasks, from peeling carrots to baking soufflés, are equally important. Anyone who’s not in the kitchen sees only the complete meal and has the idea that the chef, or whoever conceived of the repast, is the most important person.

Anyone who’s spent any time in a kitchen knows that all of the work is important because it’s all necessary. No one who’s ever fed, burped, changed or bedded a baby will tell you that one of those tasks is more important than the others. And so it is with cooking: One step leads to another, which is precisely the reason why one step isn’t more important than another.

That lesson wouldn’t become clear to me until much later. But spending time in the kitchen—it’s probably the reason I made it to my mother’s funeral. Sometimes, when I was growing up, I wondered whether I’d “make it”—whatever that meant—without learning those secrets the males of the species reveal to each other during their brief lives that still sometimes seem too long.

At some point—somewhere just after my puberty, I think—the uncles, family friends and other males who passed through gave up on me. Before that, one of my uncles wanted to take me on a fishing boat. He convinced my mother to let me go, for one day, even though I didn’t want to. All I can remember was feeling nauseous I wasn’t sure whether it was the rocking of the boat or the smell of the rotting bluefish carcasses that got to me. After that, I was always grateful that my mother would never, ever allow anything that had ever swum to end up on her counter!

Anyway—I know I’m wandering again—but once there weren’t any males older than me trying to toughen, or roughen, me up, there just weren’t any more males. Except for school—and that’s the main reason I didn’t stay long enough to get any certification that I’d stayed. Once I passed through that summer when voices deepen and boys’ bodies bulk up, nobody saw much of me on this block—or, rather, I didn’t see much of anybody else. So getting to school wasn’t difficult, until I got near it: after Adam died, there just didn’t seem to be any men or boys left between my house and school.

But once I got to school, my troubles began. Most of the kids, I suppose, had they been left to themselves, would’ve simply talked among themselves about me if they’d noticed me at all. Sure, I’d’ve been body-slammed into my locker—What kid isn’t?—and I’d’ve probably heard “faggot” or “N (as in Nancy) boy.” But even the most macho boy, at some time, has his status challenged. He deals with it (in one way or another) and the taunters move on.

It seemed, though, that the teachers egged the adolescents on. Promoting, prolonging, their adolescence—the kids’, and their own—that’s what those teachers seemed hired to do. Young people call each other “faggots,” “he-shes” and so on because they have no idea what those words mean. (The same, by the way, for “nigger” and any other racial epithet.) They’ve heard the names; they echo them and think someone will answer.

The one thing I learned for certain when I was in school is this: Those who don’t graduate, teach. The ones who can’t deal with grown-ups—that is to say, people who do what they need to do and not simply what they’re “supposed” or expected to do—spend their lives among adolescents, among people who’ve learned no more than they have. And they do everything they can to make sure their students turn out no better than they did.

I’m not thinking only about the “fag” or “sissy boy” jokes one of my teachers told. Or the one some really puerile pedagogue—I can’t remember his name—uttered. (It goes like this: Two women are in a room. One says, “I want to be frank with you.” The other says, “No, let me be Frank!”) Or even the one who divided the class this way: Boys, Girls and my former name.

In a way, public school was even worse than Catholic school. Even though my speech and body mannerisms bore more resemblance to those of girls than boys (People have always told me this.), the fact that I wore the St. Thomas School’s maroon and gray plaid in a tie rather than a skirt at least identified me with the gender the nuns hated less, or at least didn’t know enough about to hate as much as their own. They hated all the boys equally and all the girls equally, but there was a particular rage they could direct only at the ones in Mary Janes and round collars.

And I do feel fortunate for this: that I was never subject, from a nun, to the beating one girl got when, after writhing in her seat with one hand raised and the other curled around her stomach, her blood ran over the edge of the wooden slat she sat on, to the floor. It never occurred to me, before or since, that women could inflict such violence on each other—mainly because, back then, I didn’t think nuns were really women. Their habits hid their hair and everything else that identified their gender. I guess even today, as I’m almost at the end of my transition, I still hold that image.

But the public-school teachers were far more capricious and unpredictable. No nun ever said, “You can talk to me,” or even pretended to want to hear what you were feeling. Which meant, of course, that they couldn’t use what I said against me. Some public-school teachers didn’t, either, and I had respect for the ones who didn’t try to gain my confidence. But the ones who cooed their concern for you were the ones who told the other kids whatever you talked about. They had to be—I wouldn’t have told any of the other kids, boys or girls, that I helped my mother in the kitchen, much less that I enjoyed it. Or anything else about my life that they couldn’t see: I knew I’d never hear the end of it.

And no nun ever did what the teacher in the last class I ever attended—I don’t remember what subject it was—did. I sat, my face in my hand, pretending not to hear a question. He walked over to me, rapped his knuckles on my desk, then on my head. “Knock knock? Who’s there? A guy or a girl?”

Finally—and I have to admit again that Catholic school could’ve been much worse had I been a girl—no one, anywhere, before or since, has done anything like what the football coach and two of his players did on the last day I spent inside the walls of that public school.

In those days, at least in that school, coaches had to teach something besides football or basketball. Mr. Tigler was given a class in art—actually, it was more like diagram-drawing—to instruct. Now, he knew about as much about lines and proportion as I know about wide-outs. So he tried to teach the way he saw teachers in other subjects doing it: by reading from the textbook and giving the class an assignment.

All right, so there’re lots of teachers in the world. But they, even the most hateful ones, don’t do, or tell their students to do, or even allow, what Tigler got Jack and Moon, two of the tackles, to do.

I could see some sort of cue in Tigler’s eyes. Moon whined, “Aww, I thought we were gonna draw nudes in this class.” On cue, Jack’s eyes lit up: “Yeah, naked girls.” They turned to me, and Moon, who was sitting right behind me, spun me around and started to unbutton my shirt. Tigler chuckled.

No wonder the girls—who thought they were signing up for a real art class—dropped the class within the first week. Two that I know of actually signed up for sewing classes simply to get away from those boys.

After that class, as I walked down the long hallway that led from the class to the athletic field, Jack and Moon took turns body-slamming me against the lockers. Someone else yelled, “Be careful! We don’t want to mark her up!” Then they laughed and ran down to the doors.

Much as I hated those guys—and because of them and others like them, sports—I used to walk by the field, even when they were there, because it was the quickest way to Featherstone Boulevard, which I could take back to my block or to the movie theatres. Sometimes the players would blow kisses, held their hands up in a limp-wristed salute or yell, “Nancy Boy!” as I walked by. But I always thought none would attack me, because even if they weren’t arrested, they’d get kicked off the football team.

As I walked out the door, I thought I’d heard someone under the grandstand, about a hundred yards to my right. Someone grabbed my right arm, someone else my left, and they dragged me.

Underneath the steel girders, they threw me onto the sand. Someone rolled me around– I was in a daze so I couldn’t tell who–and other hands pressed mine to the ground. I pushed, they pushed harder, and someone kicked the crown of my head.

“Today we’re going to draw the female nude!” That gruff drawl: Tigler! “But first we need a female.”

“Yes, coach,” Moon droned.

“Are you sure we’ve got one?” –that drawl again.

“There’s only one way to tell, coach,” Jack intoned.

Moon tugged at my belt. “Must be a female, coach. She kicks.” But not enough to get him or the others away. They couldn’t open my belt; Moon pulled it so hard the buckle felt like it would pierce my abdomen before it snapped off the leather.

“Come on. This is taking too long,” someone else yelled.

Then Moon and Jack each tugged one side of my waistband. The button flew off, the zipper unraveled and my pants split in two. Then, as Jack started to pull down my white cotton under-briefs, Tigler drawled, “Let’s go boys.” They nearly broke my arms pulling me up off the ground and pushing me out from under the bleaches when they saw the principal walking through the parking lot on the opposite side of the field.

Foreword

This was told to me by its narrator.  It seems that we had been circling about, and glancing away from, each other for decades before we finally spoke face-to-face.

For the next three years, we would meet nearly every week in a coffee shop where neither of us could reasonably expect to meet anyone we knew.   Every one of our conversations revealed something that shocked, infuriated, saddened or surprised me.  Even more unexpected was the humor, sometimes unintentional, always ironic, that crept into our exchanges.  The tone of our conversations—or the narrator’s monologues—became more somber during our third winter. Then again, almost everything around us, it seemed, grew more solemn.

One stiflingly hot day the following summer, we both knew, though neither of us said, would be our last meeting for a long time.  I can’t recall any other time when knowing something left me feeling so anxious.  I felt something was about to change in my life; perhaps this person for whom I had become a repository (if not a confidant) felt the same way.  But one might say I had selfish interests:  our meetings were, by then, one of the few constants in my life.  I was about to enter into all matter of uncertainty and I was about to lose one of the few rituals, if you will, I’d ever developed without any prodding from anyone else.

On the other hand, my confidant (I have no better term) was used to change, if I were to believe what I heard.  I had no reason not to.  That might have been the most surprising thing I learned.

Anyway, we fell out of touch for a couple of years.  During that time, friends, family members and other people who were in my life while we were having those weekly conversations dropped out of my life.  There were deaths; others had faded out of my life or simply left.   When we re-connected, my confidant exchanged stories of our losses and, as expected, of new experiences.  I am surprised at the amount of empathy, or at least the lack of judgment, I received.  I wonder whether I reciprocated .

Some time after the New Year, we lost touch again. There was no “falling out” or other confrontation; we simply dropped out of each other’s sights for a year or so.  Then, the Friday of a Memorial Day weekend—an unseasonably hot and preternaturally clear day—we once again bumped into each other in the company of strangers.  There was one more thing to be said—about yet another death.  I heard it after promising that I would not reveal my confidant’s name to anyone or tell the story you’re about to read to anyone who would “take it the wrong way” or “make too many assumptions.”

I still don’t understand that request, but I am honoring it as best I can.  I have done my best to convey the story I’ve heard over these past few years, in the language, tone and voice I heard, so that no one will misunderstand.  Each “chapter” of this book is a session with the narrator; the titles are all that I added. 

I have undertaken this task not only out of a sense of honor, but in the realization that I was—if you’ll indulge me a cliché—hearing my own story, in some way.

I don’t know whether I’ll hear from my “friend” again.  Even if I do, I’m not sure the story will change much.  There will be new names, new places, and changes in our bodies—all things that happen with the passage of time.  I can’t tell you how any of our stories will turn out.  I know only this:  In the end, there are only people because along the way there are only those stories whose endings we don’t predict because they follow their own immutable, if sometimes mysterious, logic. 

Those peoples and stories are, ultimately, what the narrator of this book gave me over the years.  And they are all I have presented because I can’t offer anything else.  They are this book.

My life is about to change again.  How, I don’t know.

Thank you,

The recorder of this story