Coal to Diamonds (14 page)

The tyranny of beauty was an oppression the feminists had escaped. I didn’t want to be a fool. I knew that a lot of people would think I wasn’t even in the beauty-contest running because of my
size. It seemed best, maybe, to throw that baby right out with all the shitty bathwater. I could just say goodbye to femininity and all its sexy accoutrements.

Soon enough, though, these philosophies weren’t enough to keep me inspired. I loved doing my hair, playing dress-up, making up my face. I never did it to win the hearts or attentions of men or women, I did it because it was fun, it captured my imagination, it made me feel great about myself when I was all done up in some new way that no one had thought of doing before. Self-expression, even feminine self-expression, was not my enemy. The real enemy was the ideals that women are expected to live up to, and suddenly that limited style of feminism just felt like another ideal breathing down my neck. I wanted to fight oppression and be powerful, and I wanted to do it in a cute dress and a bouffant hairdo. That’s how
I
felt powerful.

In my little punk, queer, ’90s feminist world, no one wanted to feel weak, but women are always portrayed as weak. So a sub-cultural ideal of boyishness ruled at the time. We wanted to look tough, not froofy. Now it all feels like another form of misogyny—
Don’t be a “girl”
—but back then it felt like the right way to rebel against the mainstream. And so I went underground. I felt like a little boy who sneaks into his mom’s makeup bag and plays dress-up when no one’s looking. I would do my hair up all ratted and glam and then brush it out before I left the house because I thought I was supposed to be more butch.

I was a closeted femme! And I wasn’t alone. Butches transform into femmes all the time in the queer scene. A waitress I know who started out super butch made a transition over the course of two years, and now she has long hair and wears lipstick every day. It’s really great, actually, to watch someone slowly letting herself become who she truly is supposed to be. I wonder if anyone had their eye on me while I slowly unraveled my false butch persona and let the real femme out, letting my hair get bigger and bigger each day, teasing it with a skinny comb, hitting it with furtive
blasts of hairspray. Lip gloss led to lipstick led to lipstick topped with lipstick. Mascara led to eyeliner led to eye shadow. I’m not the sort who thinks that heels or hairdos are inherently feminist, but the idea that women can be trusted to choose their own forms of self-expression certainly is.

Even though Melanie wasn’t my perfect match, and might have been a little happier with me if I really had been a butch, it was still super exciting to have a girlfriend. It was a Big Deal. I’ve been kind of a serial monogamist for a long time, which I’m okay with, but it also means I don’t have a lot of experience in the dating world. I never got to have my wild time of making out with different people. I just hooked right up with a girl who really wanted to settle down. Melanie was only twenty-one, but she knew what she wanted. She talked about babies a lot. I would be like,
Babies? Whoa
. I just didn’t want what she wanted. Every time I left for a tour she’d be upset. She didn’t like me going out. I was just nineteen years old, still fresh out of Arkansas, and all I wanted to do was run around and be out in the world, having fun. Melanie was really sweet, she just had her own things she wanted to do and she was serious about them.

It was sad how things ended with Melanie. I cheated on her. I made out with her best friend, Kristin. That broke us up, then we got back together, but it was never the same. Eventually we started dating other people.

I started dating Freddie, and it was the sweetest romance, but it was complicated by my dying relationship with Melanie. I first met Freddie at a Gossip show. He was standing in the front and he was so distracting that I had to perform way on the other side of the stage from him. Freddie is a boy. I’d met butch girls before, tomboyish girls who were naturally masculine, but Freddie was something else. He’s transgendered. There are many, many different ways people deal with being transgendered. Some people
get full medical transitions and become as physically like the gender they identify with as possible. A lot of people can’t afford the procedures it takes to go that route, and others just don’t feel that they need to. Freddie felt like he already
was
a boy, he didn’t need a bunch of doctors and surgery to make him look like what the world
thought
a boy was supposed to look like. But Freddie’s identity, and transgendered identity, for that matter, is not for me to define. All I knew was that Freddie was dreamy, and he gave me shivers.

I was still with Melanie when Freddie asked me out, and the whole gay dating thing was so new and confusing, I couldn’t tell what was a platonic hangout and what was romantic. He asked me to hang out with him and I was like,
Okay, we’ll hang out
. I didn’t know he’d been asking all my friends about me, unsure of whether he should ask me out. My situation with Melanie was confusing to everyone. I’m pretty sure that no one had ever had a crush on me before. I was always the one who asked people out, but Freddie asked me. We went to the Rib Eye, one of two places that stay open late in Olympia. I sat across from him, drinking a Mountain Dew. I was broke as a joke. Freddie was very attractive, very dapper. He wore a leather jacket with a scarf and was already dating two other people at that time. At the Rib Eye he ate a sandwich, and in the car on the way home afterward he said,
Well, you could say this was not unlike a date
. I made a noise that was some cross between a squeal and a goodbye, and I literally jumped out of his car and ran inside my house. That was how things began with Freddie, and how things with Melanie ended.

At that time, my romantic life was stuck in an odd limbo. I was living with Melanie, but we were more like roommates than girlfriends. Both of us understood that I was never going to be the kind of girl she wanted, but we were scared to let go. Meanwhile, Freddie was courting me in a strangely old-fashioned way.

I was working at a T-shirt shop called Teed Off. People made bulk T-shirt orders, like for a Little League sports team. They
phoned the order in, and the T-shirts never came through. My main task at Teed Off was covering for my boss, a cracked-out miserable little man who cashed everyone’s checks, took the money, and never came up with the T-shirts. I’d hold off the angry customers as long as I could, stalling them, hoping the shirts would show up or that they’d give up, but eventually I’d just have to tell them,
I don’t think you’ll ever get your shirts. And I think we spent your money
. It was ridiculous how many times a day I’d have to answer the phone and talk to these Little League moms. Most of my time was spent fielding complaint calls from angry women, and the rest of the time was spent dusting the inventory of useless crap we sold—stupid shit like rubber duckies with devil horns, or hula girls for your dashboard. I worked eleven hours a day, five days a week, no overtime.

Freddie and I weren’t technically dating, not with me still living with Melanie, but he brought flowers to me every day at Teed Off. I don’t think I even knew what romance was, but I began to understand, watching Freddie roll up on his motorcycle outside the shop like James Dean, with a fistful of flowers. I didn’t know what to do with them—I couldn’t bring them home, so I kept them in the bathroom at work, by the sink, and I would go in and look at them when no one was there. I felt like a girl in some John Hughes movie, like I was the poor kid and he was this really beautiful, handsome jock or something. I would sit there in that shitty bathroom in front of the lovely flowers and dream about him.

One day he brought flowers in while Melanie was there. He burst through the doors with the bouquet bright in his hands, and Melanie and I froze behind the counter. We were all speechless. Freddie felt so bad, a wave of it moved over his face. He put the flowers on the counter and he just quietly left the shop. Melanie was shook up by that. She started coming by to visit more, and my miserable little boss picked up on the drama. One day when Melanie was hanging around he came out from the bathroom with his
arms full of Freddie’s flowers.
Didn’t someone bring these by for you?
he asked with mock innocence, the little shithead.
Do you want to keep them?
It wasn’t long after that that Melanie and I decided we should break up. I offered to leave, but with me and Jeri all nested in that house, it felt like ours. Melanie moved out instead.

I waited a little while, and finally when I thought I might be ready I called Freddie out of the blue.
Hi
, I said.
Hi, I think I can go on a date with you if you still want to
, and he did.

He made my gender identity make sense to me, and he made my sexual identity make sense to me. With Freddie, he was a top and I was a bottom and he was a boy and I was femme, and it all just made sense. He was really sweet to me. The way he paid attention to my stories—I had never had anyone who listened to me that way before. Freddie is seven years older than me, and when you’re nineteen years old, that’s a lot. He had train hopped, traveled across the United States that way. He’d had all these sexcapades, hooking up with girls all over the country. He’d done things I’d never heard of. It felt really scary to date someone like that, but it was exciting. He was dreamy and perfect, and I took advantage of the odd power I’d accrued by putting up with bullshit and bounced checks at Teed Off and started sauntering in hours late for my shift after getting it on all night with my new boyfriend.

I’ve always related to Freddie’s choice to not medically transition, because in some ways, it’s similar to my attitude toward being fat. My life would be easier if I were thin, if I did what I was supposed to do to have that sort of body. Some people need to make those changes in order to feel safe, but for me it feels like resisting the norm to keep my body as it is naturally. And the way Freddie is about his gender, that he doesn’t take testosterone or have surgery to change the body he’s got, that’s a resistance too. It’s a challenge—why shouldn’t he be able to have the body he’s got and the identity he wants? Since Freddie is male, doesn’t that make his body, as is, a male body?

By not changing himself physically, Freddie dares everyone around him to change their bullshit notions about what is male and what is female, and the world gets bigger for everyone. And I feel like, Why can’t I have the body I have and do all the things I want to do in this body? Each of us has made a decision to stick by the body we got and make the world change to accommodate
us
.

About a year and a half after moving away, I went back to Arkansas to visit. The Sleater-Kinney tour had ended a few months earlier and I was settled in enough to make a short trip. When I got to my mother’s house my entire family was there. They had one of those banners made of foil reading
WELCOME HOME
hanging in the living room. They had never had someone leave and then come back before. No one left. It was exciting for all of them that one of us had gone out into the world. They wanted to hear my stories and shower me with attention and questions and laughter and hugs.

It was wild to see everyone getting older, having kids, and the kids they already had getting older in my absence. People having children will really make you want to be close to your family. You don’t want to miss that. And so far, everyone in my family has done such a good job with their kids, which is remarkable considering what things were like for us. People my age in my family aren’t having very many babies of their own, which is sort of radical for where we’re from. One of my brothers doesn’t have any kids, and the others only have two, while Akasha has one. I
think that, for all the mess we’ve created, there was always something special, something a little magical and different, about my family. I’m not surprised my brothers and sisters have broken the cycles of abuse and despair. I don’t know who or what to be grateful to—maybe it’s Mom’s particular magic. I know that a lot of families suffer abuse never break that cycle, and I’m so proud of my siblings for all the revelations and sacrifices that they made to bring them to where they are today. And I could see, when I returned home on that visit, that they were very proud of me as well.

I hadn’t been gone very long but Arkansas had changed. It was changing the way every other part of America was changing, even the crappy and forgotten parts. There’s a Starbucks now, but I still get my coffee from McDonald’s. For so long McDonald’s was the only reliable place to get a cup of coffee back home, and I can’t shake the habit. They even sell iced coffee now! My cousins couldn’t believe I was drinking coffee cold when I was home. It blew their minds. Nobody drinks their coffee cold. Little things like this were giving all of us culture shock. I didn’t think twice about drinking some iced coffee, but as I watched everyone around me react it became charged with something bigger. I’d been away, had seen things, done things, and tried things, and I’d been changed by it. That whole revelation got tripped by a dumbass cup of weak and watery chilled coffee, and it was sort of hilarious, but there you go.

My family is amazingly cool, and that visit back to them just reminded me what a weird island of relative sanity they are in the Bible Belt. Even with everything that had happened, even with the shit that has gone unpunished—unacknowledged—by my family, I know how bad it can get out there and I know how lucky I am, truly, to have these people on my side. They are the most important people in the world to me. My siblings and I were always encouraged to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. That is such a simple and powerful thing to teach a kid. It teaches them compassion and gives them such a great lens to view the world through.
It shows them how to be open to life and not all shut down against it. I remember being a really little kid and some afterschool special about gays in high school was on the television. My mother stood in the room, watching me watch it.
Just imagine how it feels to be that kid in school
, Mom told me. It always stuck with me, that she said that.