Redefining Realness (7 page)

Just a few nights after our first interaction on the carpet, Derek returned to me in the soothing darkness, shaking me awake in my twin bunk bed. “You up?” he said, framing his words with a smile, one I returned as he held out his hand. I took it, and he led me across the hall to his bedroom. I could hear Chad’s snoring from behind Derek’s closed door.

He took off his shirt and boxer shorts, and for the first time I saw him fully erect. It was the length of a Barbie, with the girth of two
dolls. I stared at it as he lay down in bed. This was a penis, not his
privates
or a
thing
or
dingaling
.

“Come here,” he whispered, and I followed him, fully clothed, under his sheets.

I could hear his steady heartbeat from his chest as if I held a cup to a closed door, listening to the secrets inside him. I felt chosen. So when he unlocked my linked fingers and put them around his penis, I did not protest. He led my clenched hand up and down, slowly moving the skin over his muscle. Once I got the groove, he said, “You should kiss it for me.”

Apprehensive, I went under the covers and placed my lips on it. Then he told me to open my mouth. Soon his hands pressed the sides of my face, guiding my head up and down. I imagined it to be a Tootsie Pop. I had a pile of wrappers in my room, hoping to find one with a star so I could redeem it for a free lollipop. I had a hard time breathing as Derek moved his pelvis up and down, crushing the top of my head with a forceful palm. Then my mouth was full of what tasted like warm, spoiled ice cream and Brussels sprouts. I spit it on his stomach.

Derek reached for his boxers, wiped himself, and told me to go back to bed, to walk softly and keep his door open. That door stayed open for me for nearly two years. Blowing him became my nightly chore. When Derek shook me awake and guided me to his crotch, he didn’t say much because he’d trained me to be numb, to be silent, to act on autopilot. I was a child half asleep, but my sense of obligation to him overpowered any exhaustion I felt. It was my duty to make him feel good.

As a survivor of sexual abuse, I developed a belief system that shaped how I viewed myself:
I can gain attention through sexual acts; my worth lies in how good I can make someone else feel, even if that
means I’m void of feeling; what I do in bed is shameful and secret, therefore I will remain in the dark, a constant shameful secret.

Derek didn’t command that I tell no one, that I keep what we did in his bed a secret. He knew I wouldn’t talk because I kept myself a secret. The fact that I was feminine and wanted to be seen as a girl was something I held close. I was prime prey. He could smell the isolation on me, and I was lured into believing the illusion that he truly saw me. I was a child, dependent, learning, unknowing, trusting, and willing to do what was asked of me to gain approval and affection.

I blamed myself for years for
attracting
Derek. That I, the victim, had
asked
for it. As I write this, it sounds ridiculous, but as a survivor of sexual abuse, I have to forgive myself for how I coped and how I learned to see and internalize the abuse. I didn’t take into account that because I was different, I was more likely to be at risk of sexual abuse. Being or feeling different, child sexual abuse research states, can result in social isolation and exclusion, which in turn leads to a child being more vulnerable to the instigation and continuation of abuse. Abusers often take advantage of a child’s uncertainties and insecurities about their identity and body.

Derek took something away from me when I was only eight years old and left me with a lifetime of murkiness surrounding issues of intimacy, sex, pain, love, boundaries, and ownership of my body.

By the time I was ten, when Derek grew tired of me, I found myself wanting to fill the void that his absence created. That was when I began acting on crushes. Junior was a kid who lived across the street from us. He was kind of an asshole, at twelve the eldest in our playgroup, and the only one who had underarm hair, which you could see through his dingy rotation of tank tops, stained yellow at the pits.

We produced dramatic reproductions of domesticity in ongoing games of house, where I demanded the coveted role of mom. It was during these games, with Junior serving as my husband, that I felt most myself. I had creative license to free my hair from its rubber band and lightly order my children—Chad; Maddy, a frizzy-haired girl with whom I was close; and her half-sister, Aisha, who wore the same pair of denim cutoffs daily—to run to the corner store for groceries and swish my hips as I served my family Now & Laters and Mambas for dinner. When our play children ran errands, I had Junior to myself on the grass. It was an innocent crush that flourished under the guise of husband and wife. He would rub his open palms against my hair. My budding attraction to Junior would surface in words: I would repeat movie lines that I’d heard girls say to boys, things that made them act silly, like “I love you.” “I wish you were really a girl,” he once told me during one of our make-pretend sessions.

Though Junior was a few years older and could easily dominate me in a fight, I was smugly confident in my premature sexuality. What we once fulfilled by lying on the grass side by side quickly escalated to something more adult. Junior kissed me in the back of our house by the berry gate, where no one could see us. It was my first kiss and awakened me to sexuality in a way that my nights serving Derek never did. Junior’s unexpected kiss made me feel out of control, so I knelt in front of him and unzipped his jean shorts. He did not object when I tugged down his briefs and pulled him to my lips. My knees dug into the cool brown dirt and the air-conditioning vents roared, silencing Junior’s moaning. I made him feel good, and it felt good to be in control, or so I thought.

I knelt in front of Junior only a handful of times, but after each tryst, he made sure to point out that he wasn’t gay because he didn’t do it back. As kids, we understood gay to be bad, a label denoting weakness. Junior was fine with accepting the blow jobs as long as
he wasn’t the one being labeled, as long as we were pretending to be other people, as long as I kept quiet about our interactions. Even then I didn’t consider either of us gay; we both saw me as a girl in this context of our sexual playing, and there was nothing gay about girls sleeping with boys, I reasoned.

These trysts and my resulting questions about my gender and sexuality isolated me from my brother, who I felt could never understand me. I was blinded by an illusion that had me convinced that I was much more adult, more worldly, than Chad and thus had to carry burdens he could never grasp. Still, a part of me wanted him to understand me. Despite my isolation and uncertainty, he was my brother, and I looked forward to the routine of our evening communion, sleeping just a few feet away from each other.

“Hey,” I whispered one night after clicking the television off. “You still up?”

“What’s up?” he said, popping his head down to face me in my bunk.

“I feel like someone else sometimes,” I told him. “Like different from you and other boys.”

“I know that already,” he said, flashing his missing-toothed smile. “You don’t like boy things.”

“I guess I just wanted to tell you,” I said as he returned to his pillow. Though I didn’t have the words then to define what was going on and who I was, a part of me feared that Chad would look at me differently, and not love me anymore.

Years later, Chad told me he had “some memory” of Derek “touching” me in “some strange way.” He said, “I wasn’t fully sure if he was molesting you or not. I was too young,” and apologized for not doing something about what he’d apparently witnessed. I was struck that he carried guilt about something he couldn’t have done anything about. How ridiculous does it sound for a seven-year-old kid to say
he wished he’d done something about the abuse his eight-year-old sibling faced? “I wouldn’t say that was one of the big reasons why you ‘turned,’ ” he said. “I can’t think of another word, but you know what I mean. It was always in you, and I knew you weren’t happy with being who you were when we were younger. You wanted to be a girl.”

I was apprehensive about writing about being molested because I feared others would make the same link Chad made, pointing to the abuse as the cause of my being trans—as if my identity as a woman is linked to some perversion, wrongdoing, or deviance. What must be made clear is that my gender expression and identity as a girl predated Derek, and my expression as a child made me vulnerable and isolated, an easier target for Derek.

Gender and gender identity, sex and sexuality, are spheres of self-discovery that overlap and relate but are not one and the same. Each and every one of us has a sexual orientation and a gender identity. Simply put, our sexual orientation has to do with whom we get into bed
with
, while our gender identity has to do with whom we get into bed
as
. A trans person can be straight, gay, bisexual, etc.; a cis gay, lesbian, or heterosexual person can conform to expected gender norms or not; and a woman can have a penis and a man can have a vagina. There is no formula when it comes to gender and sexuality. Yet it is often only people whose gender identity and/or sexual orientation negates society’s heteronormative and cisnormative standards who are targets of stigma, discrimination, and violence. I wish that instead of investing in these hierarchies of what’s right and who’s wrong, what’s authentic and who’s not, and ranking people according to these rigid standards that ignore diversity in our genders and sexualities, we gave people freedom and resources to define, determine, and declare who they are.

I
look back on tailored lawns fronting freshly painted houses and teenage boys in white tank tops flaunting burgeoning biceps who push mowers and pull rakes. I see Chad and me in crisp back-to-school outfits and unscuffed shoes, soles not worn to the ground, as we walk so fresh and so clean three blocks to homeroom. I see Dad, his waves brushed on point and his uniform, starched to crease, beaming at the stage as I accept the “class leader” award at an assembly.

I won many awards in the third grade, but Dad didn’t see them until I placed them beside the living room TV, the most visible spot in the house. The reality was that Dad had stopped wearing his uniform long before. We had a front yard that was rarely mowed or watered. We got crisp back-to-school separates—a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts, and T-shirts we swapped to create more outfits—that we wore year-round until they were worn and outdated. I outgrew my jeans, the hems hovering over my ashy little ankles, at the same time I outgrew the illusion of stability that’s supposed to accompany childhood.

One afternoon in 1992, I went to my room during homework hour to grab something from my desk. Through a crack in our bedroom door, I saw Dad sitting at the desk attached to the side of our bunk. His back was hunched over, too big for the rickety chair, which resembled dollhouse furniture. White vapor misted around his head.
Maybe he’s sneaking a smoke of his Newports in our room, since Janine hates the smell in the house
, I thought. But it didn’t smell like cigarettes, and I knew this wasn’t for me to see. I was tiptoeing away from the door when Dad turned and looked straight at me. His eyes were wide, the pupils taking over his already dark brown irises. He pinched a charred glass pipe between his left thumb and index fingers, and a wrinkled piece of foil laid open on our desk.

“Why you sneakin’ around?” he said. “Get in here.”

I sat down on my bunk with my legs hanging over the wooden drawers. I looked down at my scabbed knees, blackened by skateboarding.

“Chaaaaaad,” Dad yelled, pushing the door open so his voice would carry through the hall and living room to the kitchen, where Chad was surely daydreaming about playing outside.

Chad wore an apprehensive smile when he entered our bedroom. I could tell that he thought I had gotten us in trouble, and we were in for a long lecture that would shorten his outside time. Chad sat next to me on my bunk and took in the foil and the glass pipe and what looked like small shavings of Ivory soap. Dad’s next action stuns me now in recollection. He brought the pipe to his chapped lips with his left hand, like he would a glass cigarette, and lit it with his right. The glass became cloudy with the vapor that went into him. He exhaled and released the white from his plum lips. Chad and my eyes grew large. This was against everything we heard at school. We were products of D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), programmed since we’d learned our ABCs and 123s to “Just Say No,” with graffiti on
our school walls proclaiming, “Crack Is Wack!” We were instilled with the hope that if we just said no and got an education, we could avoid the pitfalls of our community and, apparently, our own home. I bought into this dream wholeheartedly. It was all I really had, besides Chad. The dream I clutched to my chest was a black-and-white world where drugs were poison and the people who did them were poisonous.

“You see how goofy I look?” Dad said with the pipe in his hand and the vapor diminishing around him. “You see how silly I’m acting?”

I actually did not see any silliness; all I could think about was how weak he was. The strongest man I knew, my father, was smoking crack from a pipe in our bedroom, and he had the audacity to do it in front of us. I didn’t understand addiction as a disease, so I saw my father as weak. His search for pleasure and power in a pipe made him pathetic. His eyes still follow me now. They were these black balls of nothingness, like looking into an empty well with no sunlight above you.

I was not attached to this man who smoked crack, and I was tempted to raise my hand, as if we were in show-and-tell, and ask him how he felt and whether his body tingled. I equated his inhalation to the burning of mouthwash at bedtime. I wondered if he burned on the inside. I also wanted to ask how he could do this to Chad. I was naive enough to think that I could handle this. Looking at Chad, with his head down and feet pointing into the carpet, I knew he had seen too much. In that moment, I realized that Dad meant more to Chad than he meant to me. For my brother, Dad was an all-knowing hero who could do nothing wrong. That was how I felt about Mom. But as with the heroes of childhood, you realize they’re make-believe characters, and the qualities you so admired in them were magnified through your obstructed lens of adoration.