The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (53 page)

But Amy couldn't bring herself to do it; that would violate everything it meant to be trans. You got to be called what you wanted to be, what you decided you were. That was the whole point.

"If you're Mike, you're Mike," she said.

He moved back to the apartment on Sepulveda. He was broke and needed to go back to work. Randy Harvey tried not to ask too many questions, just limited it to "Will you be coming back as Mike?" Harvey suggested taking over "Totally Random," a short column of feature items. It was a simple assignment, a way to ease in. Before he returned, Mike asked the online editors to take down A Woman in Progress. They obliged by obliterating every trace of it in the system—not an easy task, and a first in the history of the paper. Harvey wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of altering the record, but the guy's mental health was at stake, he told himself.

At first Mike came into the office every few days, like Christine had, but it was awkward. He was a shell, hollowed out to the rind. "He wasn't there anymore," said Harvey. Someone heard him make a reference to wanting to kill himself, and he wound up back in the hospital for a few weeks around Christmas.

After he got out, he stuffed Christine's clothes in plastic bags and brought them to Goodwill. Slowly he got rid of the jewelry stands shaped like little Victorian dolls that had brightened up the apartment; he gave Amy the necklace with the blue glass beads that she had always admired and a pair of peridot earrings.

Much of the trans community was angry with him, and he didn't blame them. Transsexual regret was a radioactive subject, especially with someone so well known. Fewer than 5 percent of transsexuals come to lament their decision, but there it was, a
USA Today
story about his reversal: "For Some, Shadow of Regret Cast over Gender Switch." Susan had dropped him, betrayed. The vibe at church the one Sunday he ventured back had been so hostile that Reverend Thomas later took a few bitter congregants aside.

When Thomas called to make sure he was okay, Mike told him he had never stopped being Christine but that he just couldn't take the expectations, the loneliness, the loss. "He knew it was irrational," Thomas said, "but there was part of him that believed he could get his old life back."

As 2009 wore on, Amy was the only one he seemed comfortable with. She had liked Christine better than she liked Mike, but she kept reminding herself not to be judgmental, that they were the same person in all the ways that counted. Fridays, after deadline, he would come to her apartment for dinner and a DVD. The night they screened a favorite,
Wonder Woman,
he gave her his Wonder Woman costume, size 10. Christine used to wear it whenever they watched. Amy told him she would hold on to it, in case Christine ever came back. "She's not coming back," he said. "Christine is gone."

At least Lisa was willing to see him again, to have lunch or a cup of coffee; an hour with her made him happy. Amy could tell when he had seen her. His voice brightened on the phone, and when he came over, his eyes glowed turquoise again. "Lisa told him she was glad all that silly stuff was over, that she was happy he was back," said Amy. "He nursed some kind of hope it would develop beyond that."

But as the months slid into fall, the light dimmed. There were crushing bills, and no more mentions of Lisa's laugh over an afternoon latte. When Amy asked him if he'd seen her lately, he just said, "She's moved on."

November 2009 was unusually chilly for L.A., a damp cold that rarely settled over the city. The night before Thanksgiving, Mike called Amy and asked if she had a gun. "You know I can't help you with that," she said. She drove to his apartment, but when she got there he wouldn't talk about it. She dragged him to Marie Callender's for some chili, but he just stared past the chintz curtains at the cars whipping by in the darkness.

Amy was going to the home of a colleague for Thanksgiving dinner, a woman who had urged her to bring Mike along. "If you don't want to come, at least sit in my apartment and wait for me there," Amy pleaded.

"I'm driving through the Jack in the Box, and I have some errands," he told her. "Don't worry about it."

 

The call came in at 8:15
P.M.
on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. One of the neighbors and her boyfriend had spotted the Toyota as soon as they pulled into the parking structure below the stained stucco apartment building on Sepulveda. The motor was running, and a vacuum-cleaner hose snaked through the passenger-side window. A man was slumped against the seat. The boyfriend pulled him from the car, tried some CPR, and the girl dialed 911 on her cell phone.

By the time the EMS had taken Mike to the hospital in Culver City, the building manager had let two police officers into his apartment. At first, the 500-square-foot studio seemed like the typical lair of a transient single man: nothing on the walls, jeans draped over the generic pine furniture, the small fridge virtually empty. "Then I looked at the unopened mail," recalled Antonio Vasquez, one of the officers. "There was a lot of it, and most of it was addressed to a woman."

On the bed, in an envelope, was a handwritten note. For two decades, Mike Penner had crafted subtle sentences that teased the ironies out of the self-important world of sports; Christine Daniels, the woman he became for 18 months, added self-revelation and raw emotion to the mix. But in the end, there were only terse instructions.
Call my brother, John.
And Chris Foster, a close friend and colleague from the
Los Angeles Times.
And Lisa. Of course, Lisa. To her, "All my love."

 

Princess Di. Farrah. Cher. They are all here, or at least their wigs seem to be, at Christine's memorial service, on a Saturday afternoon in January at the Metropolitan Community Church. Some of the women sit together in the pews, reaching behind one another's broad backs to gently pat a shoulder; others come in alone, drawing fringed wraps or generously cut jackets around themselves to ward off the chill. By 5:00
P.M.
the room is filled, both with full-timers and those who are living as men but have slipped away to pull on a dress and pumps to remember Christine.

There was a funeral in Long Beach a couple of days after Mike's death, a farewell to "Lisa and John's idea of who Mike was," said Scott French, who was asked to speak. "The story line was that he was depressed and had tried a lot of things and they didn't work." In the entryway there was a single image: a head shot of Mike, his mouth a closed-lipped smile. French and a few
Los Angeles Times
colleagues spoke about Mike's gentle impenetrability, his boundless love of soccer, the teammates who called him the Gaffer, British slang for "the boss." They praised his talent and mourned the sadness that dogged him. The only acknowledgment that their friend spent a year and a half as a woman was when Billy Witz got up to describe Christine's joy over the first goal by the shyest of the girls they had coached. The room was silent.

Amy was the only trans at the funeral, and she sat quietly in the back. John Penner had called to invite her; they had run into each other time after time at the hospital. Another transwoman, Michelle Evans, who had struck up a friendship with Christine through the blog, had shown up with her wife of 27 years, but Lisa had insisted that John turn them away at the door.

Six weeks later, at the Metropolitan Community Church memorial, an ebony-skinned transwoman in a black-and-yellow dress belts out "Walking Around Heaven All Day" like Cissy Houston. Amy LaCoe, nervous speaking in front of so many people, looks down at her notes and recalls that Christine was "as elegant in a pullover and jeans as she was in an evening gown." Susan Horn, a size 22 in a maroon silk sleeveless top, straps on a vintage Gibson ax and launches into "Travelin' Thru," from the soundtrack of
Transamerica,
which she and Christine often watched over trays of cocktail franks and glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. By the end of the song, the crowd is weeping. A photomontage flashes across the 50-inch screens that flank the stage. The music is Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime." Christine at an awards luncheon with a toothy smile. Christine at the microphone at a conference, her hand chopping the air. Christine in a soft blue sweater, her head thrown back with laughter.

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God! What have I done?

Contributors' Notes

Notable Sports Writing of 2010

C
HRIS
B
ALLARD
is a senior writer at
Sports Illustrated.
He is the author of three books, including
The Art ofa Beautiful Game,
and is currently working on a book about the 1971 Macon Ironmen baseball team. A graduate of Pomona College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he has been at
SI
since 2000 and now lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two daughters. This is his second appearance in
The Best American Sports Writing.

 

J
AKE
B
OGOCH
, a freelance writer and former editor in chief of
Skiing
magazine, has lived and worked in five NHL cities. The latest is home to the Blackhawks.

 

Y
ONI
B
RENNER
writes for film and television. He is a frequent contributor to
The New Yorker
and has also published short humor in the
New York Times, The New Republic,
and
Smithsonian
and on the sports website
Dead-spin.com
. He lives in Brooklyn and roots for the Buffalo Bills.

 

H
OWARD
B
RYANT
is the author of
Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston,
which was a finalist for the Society for American Baseball Research's 2003 Seymour Medal;
Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball;
and
The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron.
He is a sentor writer for
ESPN.com
and appears regularly on
ESPN: The Sports Reporters, ESPN: First Take,
and
Outside the Lines.
In 2010 he received the Online Journalism Award for Online Commentary.

 

S
TERRY
B
UTCHER
is a reporter with the
Big Bend Sentinel
and Presidio International newspapers. She lives in Marfa, Texas, with her husband and son. "Gentling Cheatgrass" was her first story for
Texas Monthly.

M
EGAN
C
HUCHMAOH
is a television producer in the ABC News Brian Ross Investigative Unit. "The Coach's Secret" segment and a follow-up series of 17 broadcast stories about sexual abuse by coaches affiliated with USA Swimming, the sport's national governing body, won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in broadcast journalism.

 

D
AVID
D
OBBS
has written features and essays for the
Atlantic,
the
New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Wired, Nature,
and
Scientific American.
He is currently writing a book that explores the notion that the genes and traits underlying some of our most grievous mood and behavior probl ems may also generate some of our greatest strengths, feats, and happiness. He is the author of three books about science, culture, and the environment, including the acclaimed
Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
He blogs on these and other subjects at Neuron Culture, hosted at Wired Science. You can see more of his work at
http://daviddobbs.net
.

 

J
ASON
F
AGONE
is the author of
Horsemen of the Esophagus,
an account of his year as a beat reporter on the competitive eating circuit. His journalism has appeared in
GQ, Esquire, Wired,
the
Atlantic, Slate, Philadelphia, The Penn Stater,
and
Deadspin.com
. He lives in southeast Pennsylvania with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about American inventors and super-efficient cars.

 

M
ICHAEL
F
ARBER
has been a senior writer at
Sports Illustrated
since 1994. He won two Canadian National Newspaper Awards for sports writing while at the
Montreal Gazette
and in 2003 received the Elmer Ferguson Award for distinguished hockey writing from the Hockey Hall of Fame. A native of New Jersey, Farber has lived in Montreal since 1979. He and his wife, Danielle Tetrault, have two children.

 

T
OM
F
RIEND
is a senior writer at
ESPN.com
and an on-air feature reporter for ESPN television. He has worked for the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the
San Jose Mercury News,
and the
Kansas City Star
and was a columnist in the early 1990s for the now-defunct
National Sports Daily.
He has co-authored two books:
Educating Dexter,
the autobiography of an illiterate football player, Dexter Manley; and
Jack of All Trades,
the autobiography of baseball crony Jack McKeon. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri. His recent print work has been cited by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and his television work earned a 2010 New York Festivals Award. He lives in southern California with his wife and two children.

 

N
ANCY
H
ASS
, a contributing editor at the
Wall Street Journal Magazine,
has written about culture and commerce for two decades. Her work is frequently seen in
GQ;
she has been on the staff of
Conde Nast Portfolio, Talk,
and
Newsweek;
and she spent a decade under contract as a featured writer at the
New York Times.
From 1998 to 2004 she was a member of the journalism faculty at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She lives in New York City with her daughter, Dahlia, and her husband, Bob Roe, a longtime editor at
Sports Illustrated.