Real Man Adventures (16 page)

I tell a story in my presentation about a trans woman in Memphis who was beaten in the police station, and nobody helped her. [The officers] tried to cover it up, and when the video tape of the whole incident got out, she was going to sue the department, but then she was found in an alley with a bullet in the back of her head. Those officers are still working.

TC: Do all of your colleagues know you are trans?

DW: Some do, some don’t. I am not stealth, so if they ask I tell them the truth, but it’s a nonissue. I have been in the division for twelve years, and I transitioned almost eight years ago, and people I work with don’t care, and neither do the new people. I do not mean to sound like a dick, so I apologize if it comes across like it, it’s just no one really cares that I used to be female. I still get the occasional question here and there, but it’s not an issue.

TC: Do any suspects ever know?

DW: No, and why would they need to?

TC: Yeah, I guess that’s a dumb question…

DW: We also have a trans woman on the job. She transitioned and then joined the LAPD, and the department has kept her name and everything else private. She’s [completely] stealth; I don’t even know who she is.

TC: You transitioned into, like, America’s most hated (a black male), while I transitioned into essentially America’s most loved (a white male—though to be honest people generally think I’m Middle Eastern or Puerto Rican). At any rate, in what ways has this changed how you are perceived on the job? Is it different from how you are perceived in civilian clothes, like, just as a black man walking into a convenience store or down the street?

DW: I had prepared everything in my life for my transition, and I do mean everything—except the being a black man thing. You are right: I am now the most hated and feared, and racism is alive and well, and it truly sucks. When you come to L.A. I will have to tell you about all of it. The black man was not always the “angry black man”; just shit around him caused him to be angry.

TC: When I come to L.A. we are not going to waste time talking about depressing racism and angry black men. We are going to
spend our time with you whipping my ass into shape in the gym so I can one day be as giant as you are.

DW: Ha, yeah. But I love to eat, so we can discuss workouts over lunch or dinner.

TC: How has your “other” family (of origin) handled your transition?

DW: It was a nonissue. I am the oldest kid and I take care of my mom. I have one sister, four brothers, and six adopted little brothers, and not even my dad, who lives in Texas and is a Jehovah’s Witness, has objected to the new me.

TC: Are there things female officers aren’t allowed to do, but that you are allowed to do now after transition?

DW: No. All officers are Blue. Gender is not a factor. Your badge says “Police Officer.” (Back in the old days of the LAPD, the badges said “Police Woman” and “Police Man.”)

TC: What are you doing in the department now, and what are your plans for the future?

DW: I’m still an instructor at the Police Academy, and I am in nursing school during my off hours. I am due to retire [from the department] in about three and a half years, but that doesn’t mean I am necessarily going to retire. It’s just nice to be able to say that. I want
to be a RN and move up to the transman holy land of Washington State.

TC: Can I use your full name, —Dexter Ward, for the book?

DW: I would prefer you to use just Dexter Ward; it’s like being stealth, but not really.

TC: I hear that.

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country where we live now. In the late summer and fall you can often hear the nearby high school band out practicing on the football field during school days, and then cranking it up a few notches every other Friday night from their corner of the stands during home games. The improbably upbeat cheerleaders. The old guy with the young-sounding voice announcing the game over a jacked-up PA system, punctuated by the referees’ whistles. The occasional cheer from the crowd, volume regulated by whatever wind’s blowing that night. When I give the dogs their last walk on Friday evenings, I always take them to this spot just before our street drops off down the hill toward the high school, where I can see a slice of bleachers through the trees, a bright halo of haze above it all.

So one weekend I decide to take my girls to a game, their first, on the first day of fall, just the three of us. Montessori kids through and through, they have never experienced anything quite like it, don’t really know what to expect, reflexively eschewing competition of any kind as they do. They are both tired and resistant. One is leery of the crowd (she’s not a fan of loud noises generally), the other just this side of too cool for everything. But the moment we step through security and into the lights on the track surrounding the field, they are both game.

There is something for each of us: D—’s eyes snap to the long line of the opposing team’s cheerleaders in tight, neat green-and-yellow uniforms, cranking out nonstop, just that side of too-grown-up pelvic gyrations. She loves to dance, can’t help but bob her head along with a cheer when she thinks nobody’s looking.

M— is hypnotized by the tubas in the rear and the popping of the drums, the chewed-up sticks clicking on rims. But mostly the too-big, too-boxy, too-synthetic, and completely asexual band uniforms, from shiny borrowed dress shoes to vibrating feathers in caps. (“I might like to wear one of those one day,” she says after the halftime show winds down and the home team is setting up kick-off.)

And for me there is the game.

Not to sound like a pervert, because I’m not a pervert, really, but in between fielding a barrage of questions from the kids, getting the right amount of ketchup on a burger for one, waiting for a slice of cold pepperoni pizza to arrive for the other (while simultaneously making sure she doesn’t snag more than a sip off my highly caffeinated Mello Yello), I am checking out the players on the sidelines. The stuffed and stretched triangles of their jerseys capped off with
neck rolls; the rows of dinged-up helmets suspended at thigh level, not-yet-man hands threaded through their face masks; the second-and third-string guys’ pads never looking quite right in their pants. The particularly narrow-waisted guys (likely lowerclassmen) standing on the bench in spotless uniforms watching the game over their coaches’ and teammates’ heads. Many of them my size or smaller, the size I’ve been pretty much since high school.

By the time we arrive, the home team is up 14–zip, so I don’t bother fussing too much with the game; I can’t really with the kids there, it has become about something else entirely. I find myself wanting instead to keep them engaged, pointing things out, the intricate placement of the flags lying on the field before the show, the drum major’s glittery shirt (how has someone not creamed him for that?), the teenagers smoking and making out beneath all of us on the concrete bleachers. (“You may kiss boys, you may experiment with a vast and wide swath of things,” I say to the older one, “But you will NEVER smoke a cigarette, ever. I never did, not even once. You won’t either.”)

The little one asks about positions and numbers, what I played, and I tell her I would’ve been a running back, and if not a running back, then possibly a tight end. Or wide receiver. She doesn’t know what any of those are, is just starting to figure out which dude gets the ball hiked to him after shouting a flood of nonsensical numbers on the field. And what he does with it after that. She finds it hard to follow the tiny ball with so many other things going on.

When I played with friends throughout my childhood and up to puberty, I often played quarterback, and thus captain, getting to hand-select my team before each game. I was good; football was
just kind of my thing, where I felt most adept in my body. My ideal sport. Somewhere there are a few photographs of me playing ball with some buddies during these years—on the playground, on the beach, in the middle of the street until it’d grow too dark to see the ball anymore. In one image that sticks in my head, I am about the age my younger girl is now, and in it I appear pissed off, one hand gripping an end of a blue-and-yellow Nerf ball, the other out to my side, palm up, frustrated about something—a dropped pass, missed tackle (we are on the beach in this particular shot, so no touch or flag rules apply)—or possibly I’m disappointed in myself, for a bad pass. I have regrouped my team, am approaching the line of scrimmage to give it another down, leather tan with scraggly-ass hair, frowning in concentration.

I’ve always loved football, though I never played on an organized team. Title IX was born the same year I was, so I suppose I could’ve tried. But I didn’t hear about all those “firsts” until it was way past my time to do anything about them: the first girl to play Pop Warner ball in 1974; the first on a varsity team somewhere in New Mexico the following year; various backup punters and guards and special teams members who fought to have rules bent and parents and school boards assuaged, guarantees granted that there would be no whining to authorities if a girl ended up hurt while trying to play with the “big boys.”
¹
And nowadays they have full-contact girls’ and women’s football, though I don’t think I would’ve
played either, had it been an option when I was in school—or even when I was (technically) qualified to do so. Too much like a consolation prize.

“It’s like when the gay guy kicked the ball through the middle of the thingies on
Glee,
” M— suggests after a kick, trying to follow my repeated explanations of the difference between a punt, a field goal, and an extra point.

“Kind of,” I say.

“Why do you know everything if you didn’t play?” she asks then, polishing off her burger. “Too short?”

We laugh—the old family standby about my height, how their mother dwarfs me by a good four or five inches, how they will likely do the same in a matter of months (for one), a year or two, tops (for the other).

Our local high school is one of the many “failing” schools of the South, the kind you can request your way out of by citing a dire need for your child to take advantage of something offered at a nonfailing school that is not offered at your failing school. Like German. Or AP classes. Or fewer weapons, kids of color, pregnancies. Less meth. The school has been state champs in football a handful of times, once quite recently. Some kids have gone on to solid careers in college ball, from Division I on down.

I didn’t go to the same kind of school, exactly, but I did go to one where sports were vital. Volleyball and soccer dominated my life in high school (in college it was rugby and the study of tae kwon do). I participated in sports year-round in high school, playing in clubs and training camps during off-seasons. I won some Plexiglas student-athlete award endowed by Xerox during my senior year,
was also named to the first team all-state and all-league during my junior and senior years, and second team all-league during sophomore year in volleyball.
²
Our team won a California state championship one of those seasons, came in second during another, I can’t remember which was which now. (I do remember driving back from Fresno really bummed some weekend, like suicidally bummed, after missing first place by the narrowest of margins one season. Feeling I could’ve done better, done more.) In a state where volleyball was at least as important as football, suffice to say high school remains for me a blur of pressure, most likely of the self-imposed persuasion. Of constantly battling to balance homework with the need for repetition of another sort, for practice. For perfection.

On the way back from the concession stand (for a second time), I notice a few ladies decked out in maroon sitting at a long banquet table adjacent to the stands—team moms and grandmas, parked on folding chairs behind several towering piles of our team’s jerseys, separated into home and away colors.

“How much are these?” I ask one of them.

“Ten dollars, hon’. They’re the actual jerseys the boys wore in the championship game,” the lady says in a contorted drawl, rearranging a tiny bundle of a baby—definitely not her baby—over a shoulder.

I start riffling through the jerseys.

“What number you looking for specifically, sir?” another lady asks. Helpful. Sweet. “We got just about all of ’em.”

“I’ll know when I see it; I have a lot of lucky numbers,” I say, and she laughs as I begin in earnest to scan the shoulder numbers on each shirt, trying not to make too big a mess of the table. I am more drawn to the home jerseys, maroon-and-white, tipped with black, and my kids start getting in on the task of locating just the right one. They keep holding them up to me: “This one!”

“No, get this one! Can I borrow it sometime?”

“It’s too big for you.”

“So? I’ll tie it.”

D— holds up 72, my birth year (way too long in the waist), and M— finds 4, Gammy’s birthday, the grandmother I had been super bonded with when I was young (way too big). And then there are some other contenders that I will always associate with favorite NFL players: 8 (Troy Aikman), 22 (Emmitt Smith), 84 (Jay Novacek), 34 (Walter Payton), 20 (Barry Sanders), 32 (Marcus Allen). But nothing really sticks out. Until it does. On the bottom of the second pile, the number-12 home jersey, and it is just the right size and length, Goldilocks on the gridiron. I suddenly remember that 12 had always been my jersey number, the one I wore in every sport—even the one where each position has a specific number assigned to it already (rugby).