Davey Davis's Blog, page 15
May 3, 2023
David Davis
The first time I was catcalled, as people like to put it, I was about 13. It was the middle of the afternoon on a fiery summer day in the bone-dry Northern California town where I grew up. My dad’s apartment wasn’t in a nice neighborhood, but nor was it anywhere that was thought to be unsafe; unless I could catch a ride with my parents, I walked, biked, and ran everywhere I wanted to go.
Despite the heat, I was running. A few blocks from home, a group of men began to tail me in their car. One of them was recording me with something1. Because I was ugly, I believed, not yet aware that what I looked like didn’t matter, beyond my gender and age. I was afraid, which was the point. The men laughed at me together.
We all have our little stories. Most men harass us in public with the modest goal of frightening or angering us, though many of course are more ambitious2. Our fear and fury derive from the humiliation of being so exposed, and so meaninglessly so.
As I got older and uglier, the various mainstream catcalling discourses, most of which I encountered online in places like Tumblr, the feminist blogosphere, and Gawker media, felt almost as humiliating. Street harassment was still happening to me, but because it didn’t usually resemble what happened to normal women, with its Nixon mask of what we call desire—a thing that we pretend is interchangeable with love, affection, good intent—it didn’t seem to exist for other people. Normative desirability as a prerequisite for gendered violence is a sensational mindfuck: if you’re normal you deserved it, and if you’re not normal you should consider yourself lucky, and also you deserved it.
As the weather warms, said mindfuck is on my mind. Not passing is funny, because when men talk to me in the street now, it’s usually with such a lack of hostility that I can’t even get angry. Sometimes I even smile at them—heretofore a violation of policy. It feels cowardly to admit that there’s relief in being sexually harassed in a gentle way. It feels unfair to have become something that often appears less vulnerable, turning what was once a potential assault into a mere proposition between two people who acknowledge each other as such. It feels sexy to know that an exchange could become an encounter just as easily as it could become violent if the man in question has any revelations about who, or what, he is talking to.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1I think I’m too old for it to have been a phone.
2This post focuses on gendered harassment, which is not a unidimensional thing! I want to avoid shrinking down the idea of street harassment to the limits of catcalling and similar. Let’s keep in mind that public interpersonal violence happens in bathrooms, places of business, and subways, is perpetrated by people of all genders (especially white, cis, and housed ones), and is often empowered or reinforced by people who have been de facto deputized by the state.
April 23, 2023
David Davis 42, part 3
It happens, I say. It’s fine. Some men recoil. Some ask if they can touch me, to reassure me, while we wait it out. Some exhibit an endearing confidence they can talk my body out of its panic. There’s one man that can keep fucking me through the tears and hyperventilation; somehow he knows when I can take it and when he needs to stop. Just a moment, I say. Not a big deal.
I don’t know why it happens, though I have my suspicions about certain environments and sensations. No need to reveal them here. But even just being close to someone, in some state of undress, under dimmed lights, is dangerous. I can tell by the way your breathing changes, Jade told me once, as my heart raced under her acrylics.
Since I started sleeping with men again, none have ever been unkind to me when it happens. I used to think this was pure luck. Until recently, when it occurred to me that maybe it only happens when I know I’m safe.
Worrying is like praying for things you don’t want is a bumperstickerism for the ages, the dreck of embroidered pillows and Kohl’s discount racks, the neurotic’s cruel reminder that fearing your fears is not only unpleasant and ineffectual, but perhaps even self-fulfilling.
From fridge magnets to small talk, the platitude, like the meme, gains its charge from repetition. But in the war of attrition against nuance, the cliche is not an infallible enemy. In fact, we can turn its power back on itself: if worrying and praying are indeed the same mechanism, is it possible that fears and fantasies are more similar than we might think?
I often write here at DAVID about my interest in denaturalizing desire, a thing so overdetermined that most of us can’t even recognize that which we want most in all the world. When I find myself preoccupied with one of my standard anxieties—like knocking out all my teeth, or chopping off my pinky along with the cabbage—I find it helpful to remember that these are fantasies, too, albeit unpleasant ones. In choosing to allow desire to encompass the unpleasant, the negative, and the taboo, I’m not admitting that deep down I actually want to amputate my own finger. Rather, I’m giving myself permission: to worry without struggle, to want what I shouldn’t, to suffer when there is no alternative. To do my best to, as the Bhagavad Gita recommends, meet this transient world with neither grasping nor fear.1 It’s not possible to be ready for it every time it happens. Fighting to do so only makes it more painful.
My journal tells me that a few years ago I wondered, How can I want something so bad that scares me so much? Liz looked up from her book about Lysander the Spartan. That’s everything, she said.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1For some reason, I’m reminded of the recent viral video of the man furiously destroying a Walmart display of beer cans because the company that produced them partnered with a trans woman for an ad campaign.
April 14, 2023
DAVID: Members Only
I’m always thinking of my older sister, C, or I’m used to thinking of myself as always thinking of her. Somebody has to. But since going back to California last September, it makes me angry. Too angry. I can’t bear how angry it makes me.
It’s worse when we talk. There’s a script, which she wrote1 and which I can’t stray from if I want to communicate with her. But I’m not communicating with her anyway, because she’s not calling to share new information or to find out how I’m feeling. She’s calling to run the script, which I know well, but not perfectly—no one but she can know it perfectly—and emotional spontaneity isn’t easily tolerated. If she says, How are you feeling today, brother? and I say, I’m feeling kind of sad, she will absently respond, I’m glad you’re feeling better now, brother. The loose ends are tidied with rote and ruthless efficiency. Feeling over. Next subject.
April 8, 2023
David Davis 42, part 2
When I worked in a dungeon a thousand years ago, there was this client that all the girls called Pony Brad. Pony Brad was weird, even by our standards.
At first, everything seemed normal. When booking, Pony Brad would request what seemed to be a regular incest roleplay (usually with two providers, though he often had walk-ons, too). Pony Brad was back-of-house, of course. When booking, this client used the simple, whitewashed Brad, which of course was not his real name. Pretty workaday stuff, pretty unremarkable. Since I was, and still am, compelled by incest fantasies, Pony Brad could select me from among the girls who included this activity on their yes list.
When Pony Brad arrived for our first session, the other girl and I took care of business, then brought him to the Green Room. Pony Brad pointed at me and said, “You’re my aunt,” and at the other girl and said, “and you’re my sister.” Straightforward enough. So far, so good. Time to put on the old razzle-dazzle and make out with a bitch I lowkey despised while pretending that we were all related.
But not three minutes passed before Pony Brad suddenly made a Martin Luther-worthy volte-face. “Now I’m the dad! And you’re the daughter! And you’re the mom!” (Avengers, reassemble!) He did this over and over again, without allowing for any time to inhabit the characters he’d given us, preventing any fidelity to the fantasy as we understood it. All the other girl and I could do was giggle and try to keep up. Pony Brad was an improv exercise—a stone-cold sober one, at that—which meant Yes, anding our way through a series of scenarios that soon led the reason why everyone called him Pony Brad.
Sometimes when the pony entered the chat, it manifested as Brad himself. Sometimes it was assigned to you and/or your coworker. Sometimes everyone was the pony, all three (or more) of us. Other than decreeing pony as your (or his) new identity, Brad did not offer any other explanation as to the creature’s function, or character, or origins. Pony play? Sorry, that would be too legible. Other than a little winnying, Brad’s pony was as divorced from kinky conceptions of the equine as it was from reality. It could speak. It could walk on two feet. It sucked on Brad’s nipples. It sucked on the other girl’s nipples. It snuck into Brad’s house through the window late at night (to suck his nipples). It often rode Brad like a pony (no one knows why Brad didn’t ride the pony, as nature intended). The pony seemed capable of everything that was not ponylike, especially breaking and entering. It was like Lassie or Flipper or, yes, Mr. Ed, an outrage against god repackaged as the normal, delivered to us as providers with the expectation of coherence that would have made us feel gaslit if we didn’t also get the feeling that Brad really did think that everyone else followed his erotic logic. I was desperate to find out what he would do if he encountered a real pony1.
The climax of Pony Brad’s scenes was not his orgasm, but rather the moment when the pony revealed itself2. Its entrance was the heart of the fantasy that brought him to the dungeon where me and my friends fried eggs, smoked weed, and did homework between sessions. He wasn’t trying to destabilize us, to find our weak spots, as clients often did. Pony Brad was just a genuine weirdo with a mutilated attention span.
After our sessions, every girl was expected to fill out a 3x5 with notes about their client, all of which were stored in a card catalog in the office (a mechanism you’ll recognize if you’re a Millennial or older)3. On the card, you’d list the client’s interests, usually in acronym form (r/p for roleplay, s/o for strapon, etc.), how long he booked, what room you used. Now you or another girl could pull the card the next time the client tried to book and get the CliffsNotes on what he liked, what he didn’t, if he tipped, whether he knew how to clean his asshole. You could learn if a guy was annoying, or the type who only went for new girls because he was a predator, and a cheap one at that, or even 86’d, as they sometimes were.
Pony Brad had a lot of cards. I wish I could go back and read what I wrote about him.
“We’re not looking at mere fantasy, here,” I wrote in Part 1 of this series, “but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted…The memory of a fantasy, after all, its own fantasy.”
If we were to attempt to understand the desires of Pony Brad with only the acronyms written on his 3x5 card—and without the rest of the card for context—we would fail. His fantasy would be incommunicable, a hermetic vision that couldn’t be shared and enjoyed with (or profited on by) other people. Even having heard rumors from girls who’d seen him before, I walked into my first session with Pony Brad with a specific idea of what an incest fantasy should be. The problem was that it looked and felt and manifested differently for Pony Brad than it did for most other people.
Is this a problem, as I’ve just put it? Well, no, not among adults communicating their desires to each other freely, whether as a recreational pursuit or a transactional one. But it becomes problem when fantasies like Pony Brad’s need to be expressed in ways that evade censure on certain platforms or in certain spaces, where it has been decided—by the state, the church, the family, the pigs, the credit card company—that some desires are inherently unsafe or obscene, even when being shared by and among consenting adults. Pony Brad’s pony (and what a beautifully protean pony it is!) illuminates the difference between fantasy as our own unique yet shareable pleasure engines and fantasy as an avenue for disciplining, regulating, and ultimately capitalizing on the individual’s desires—natural healthy normal beautiful sensations of which all have been blessed, but so many are deprived4.
In leather and its subcultures, we refer to the action of BDSM as play, and Pony Brad’s (only some of which was actively sexual) really did remind me of a hyperactive kid at recess, tyrannizing the make-believe of his friends with a game that no one else understood. His play was not to my taste, but I don’t remember him as a difficult client. He certainly wasn’t dangerous, though he was annoying; following the session, he did what a lot of tricks inexplicably do and pulled out his phone to show us photos of his parents, who were back in India arranging a marriage for him that he didn’t want.
I worried for the future Mrs. Pony Brad, less because of her husband’s fantasies than for his refusal to cope with the real life. Like many clients—like many straight men—he was a victim of his own magical thinking: maybe, someday, one of us hookers would take him away from his dreadful obligations, saving him from the middle-class family life that rejected us without a second thought.
Since Twitter began restricting Substack links, it’s now a little more difficult for DAVID to get around—so if you’d like to share, please do. Consider it a personal favor 💋
As always, find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1Why a pony and not a horse??
2He may have cum and he may not have, I can’t recall. This was a thousand years ago, remember?
3Tina Horn, a fellow alumnus of the dungeon in question, has written or podcasted about this card catalog somewhere before…
4I’m not making the claim that all of these are sexual, though they very often are!
March 31, 2023
DAVID: Members Only
After hooking up, we laid on my bed together, chatting and sharing a j. He told me about his upcoming plans to visit family in a distant country, where the women are known to be particularly beautiful. He had been relaxed and speaking with some excitement, but as he said this, he abruptly cut himself off: forgetting himself, he had talked to me as a straight man talks to another straight man. This put us at risk of doing something homosocial, which put our very recent past at risk of being something homosexual.
That cis men of all orientations lie to themselves in order to have sex with me is nothing new. I used to think I could predict the nature of these lies based on the liar telling them: some straight men think of me as a girl, some gay men think of me as a boy, and some bi men think of me as the best of both worlds, as they’re inclined to put it. What I’ve learned since going on hormones is that not only are these lies unpredictable, they’re often not even internally consistent.
DAVID: Members only
After hooking up, we laid on my bed together, chatting and sharing a j. He told me about his upcoming plans to visit family in a distant country, where the women are known to be particularly beautiful. He had been relaxed and speaking with some excitement, but as he said this, he abruptly cut himself off: forgetting himself, he had talked to me as a straight man talks to another straight man. This put us at risk of doing something homosocial, which put our very recent past at risk of being something homosexual.
That cis men of all orientations lie to themselves in order to have sex with me is nothing new. I used to think I could predict the nature of these lies based on the liar telling them: some straight men think of me as a girl, some gay men think of me as a boy, and some bi men think of me as the best of both worlds, as they’re inclined to put it. What I’ve learned since going on hormones is that not only are these lies unpredictable, they’re often not even internally consistent.
March 22, 2023
David Davis 42, part 1
Of all my bad habits, it is the ruthless desire to befriend that exerts the strongest pull on my behavior. Not that I want more friends — God, no. If anything, I’d love to drop about 80 percent of the ones I have, so I could stop remembering their birthdays. But because I can’t quit — because constantly pulling strangers into my orbit is what stabilizes my bearing in the universe — I have determined to double down.1
This excerpt from Caity Weaver’s recent NYT piece about group-travel companies designed to help upwardly-mobile Millennials make friends caught my attention: in describing her compulsive need to gather companions, Weaver pins down my own compulsive need to get laid23. Swap “befriend” with “fuck,” and she’s describing my relationship to casual sex.
While on a meticulously curated trip to Morocco, Weaver finds herself in the company of 12 other women like her—“the Jeff Bezoses of friend-making”—and arrives at the conclusion that what really unites them is not how they make friends, but why. “My tendency to mechanically entrap others into friendship seemed suddenly explicated: I do it because I have no tolerance for those who unintentionally imperil fun party moods by fostering atmospheres of social awkwardness,” she writes.
The founders of the group-travel company in question rely on this tendency, of course. Their clients are “‘decision makers or leaders’ in their regular lives who ‘want somebody else to take control’ of their vacations” because they have “decision fatigue” from the pressures of having it all. Coming as no surprise to anyone, Type A types like Weaver are control freaks, and vacations like this one have been devised not for relaxation but for a distinctly unrestorative pleasure, which is found in the illusion of giving up control without having ceded a single inch.
If you’ve been around since the beginning of DAVID, you might remember how often I wrote about fantasy in the early days. At the dawn of hormonal transition and the pandemic, this project was my distraction from loneliness, fear, and overwork. On the bleeding cusp of being alive, I was tipped back into the ether by 2020 (as so many of us were) with a series of personal tragedies and frustrations. Like finally deciding you want that surgery, only to be told that you must wait another year—another five—before you can have it, I learned through contrast what it’s really like to be crushed by desire.
In my lowest moments, I missed Jade and my friends, I panicked about money and my chronic illness, and I grieved the worlds I once took for granted. Without reducing its substance, fantasy—whether it was about getting hurt by my friends, or fucking strangers, or simply being in a bar4 with other people again—stood in for yearnings too hurtful to look at dead-on. I’d rather want than need, you know?
But I kept going. So did you. The first years of the pandemic are now behind us, as is my second puberty, more or less, and I’ve been given some freedom to pursue the daydreams that kept me going. Some have been attained, others still wait in the wings, and yet others will forever defy realization, as they should. With age, experience, and a tempering of urgency, I’d like to think I’ve gotten some perspective on all of it, enough to return to DAVID’s roots, now that it’s aboveground. If early DAVID was about fantasies yet to come, this stage will ask after fantasies old, failed, retired, and betrayed. The memory of a fantasy, after all, its own fantasy.
To hearken back to the old DAVID tagline—a mise en abîme in serial—we’re not looking at mere fantasy, here, but fantasy remembered, refracted, even regretted. I typically structure these series in posts of three, but since fantasy is my gluten-free bread and dairy-free butter, this one may take a while.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1Italics mine.
2It feels bitchy to describe this piece as “fluffy,” although I think that it is, while also being well-written, funny, and insightful, as I’ve come to expect from Weaver over the years.
3By the way, I don’t subscribe to the New York Times. Steal the New York Times! This is what I think about the New York Times!
4When I tell you that I’ve cried to this TikTok.
March 17, 2023
David Davis
Below is an excerpt from a November 2017 journal entry.
broke up with [Redacted] last week. that same day, a strange blemish on my face—not quite a zit, something hardier and smoother and resistant to popping for months and months—burst open, expelling something white and solid and smooth, like an egg yolk. it healed a few days ago, my skin the same as before it arrived, as if it had never been there.
[Redacted] is my storied Bad Relationship. We all have one. Art that comes to mind when I think of her include Tár (2022) and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, for reasons that probably don’t require a lot of explanation. Less obvious are Dennis Cooper’s Closer, God Jr., Ugly Man: Stories, and The Marbled Swarm, all of which I read in the months leading up to my announcement to [Redacted] that I was moving out of our apartment, which was really, for all intents and purposes, her apartment.
Though Closer was a revelation, I needed to check my reading list to confirm the Coopers; 2017 was a fuzzy year. But I didn’t need the journal entry to confirm the blemish. I think about it not infrequently, because I like signs, and things that lend themselves to interpretation as signs. I removed something repulsive from my body on the same day that I removed something violent from my life. Very tidy.
Personally, I don’t think that imposing significance is all that different from finding it.
Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night to pee. A cockroach, big and sensitive, looked up at me from the bathroom sink. It’s the kind of insect that makes me feel like a cartoon elephant, so fearful of the mouse that it leaps onto the table. The cockroach was so big that it knocked over my almost-empty bottle of hand soap while fleeing the scene. I haven’t been sleeping well anyway lately, but that little nip of panic ruined the rest of the night for me. I was up until 4 am.
Yesterday, something happened that made me sad. When I got home for the night, I worked on the new book, Casanova 20, in bed for a while. Then I shut my laptop, turned off the lamp, and closed my eyes.
Not long after, I woke up. I didn’t have to pee. But I did have a feeling.
There are surely thousands of cockroaches in my building. Who knows how many wait until my apartment is dark and still to climb into the drain of my bathroom sink, for water, I suppose. But I knew that the motherfucker in my sink was the same one I had seen a few nights before. I knew that he was back, waiting for me.
Insects—with their associations with filth, contagion, overwhelm—factor into my mental health history in such a way that developing a relationship with an “individual” bug is never a great sign. But now that the cockroach had an identity, he and I had a rapport. Because I knew him, I was less afraid of him, though my disgust was just as extreme. But I was also more determined to end his life. He fled again, but waited on the underside of the sink, watching me. I knocked him to the floor and crushed his body with the dustpan. His corpse went in the toilet. Before I went back to bed, I bleached the whole bathroom.
When I was back under the covers again, I fell asleep right away. I slept all night.
There’s a sign there. What is it?
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
March 13, 2023
David Davis 41, part 3
In a 2002 conversation between John Berger and Michael Ondaatje, the writers consider the creative process. Ondaatje says that in order to work he sometimes needs to “escape that place where you are very conscious of the audience.” The great Berger, holding his own hands like a happy saint, investigates.
Berger: Are you withdrawing to yourself or to somewhere else? Tell me about the place where you find yourself when you withdraw. Is it here? Is it there?
Ondaatje: I don’t think it’s withdrawing. It’s more like descending, in the sense that I’m trying to descend to a level that I haven’t gone before. If I began to write something that I already knew, it would be a problem for me. I’m trying to accept the given of what I know and then write something that I don’t know. And that’s why that privacy, that secrecy, which I’m obsessed with, is necessary. It becomes discovery as opposed to clarification.
Have you, as a writer, visited this place before? A place that, despite hopefully producing written work, is nonverbal, even sublingual? That is extraconscious, metaphysical, spiritual? That is both communicative (communal) and private (exclusive)? (Instinct, said Proust, is that which makes art “the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment.”) And are you excited, as Berger is, to regard another artist’s experience of this place? His acknowledgement of Ondaatje’s descent to an inaccessible place is a gift to his colleague, and the opportunity to watch him do so, another gift.
Few things are more creatively energizing than the generosity on display between Berger and Ondaatje, which is why I recommend watching the conversation in full, even if you’re unfamiliar with both writers. The warmth between them, artist to artist, is palpable, invigorating. I’m not a Ondaatje fan, but I don’t need to be to feel the mutual esteem and appreciation. I think I might like all artists, though I know I don’t like all art. Sometimes I’m moved by a work of art and sometimes I’m moved by the artist that produced it; in this latter sense, the art is almost negligible.
Is that wrong? It’s how I feel, at any rate1. If it matters, what I think (which here mirrors how I feel) is that artist is a sensibility. It’s a way of seeing, doing, feeling, reckoning, connecting. Being a sensibility, artistry is distinct from commerce. Though it can be capitalized upon, it cannot be measured by, say, books sold or dollars earned. For these reasons, an artist need not be economically viable. An artist need not be recognized in their time. An artist need not be successful, or even not fail. They need only to be encountered.
Audience is not just who you’re writing for (or who you’re momentarily evading). Audience is also a marketing term for the group of consumers for whom a given product is intended.
When I was being interviewed about my book, X, during its launch last year, I got asked about audience a lot: Who is this book for? As questions go, it’s not unfair, but neither is the answer that I usually wanted to give, which was: Me. I knew, however, that simple as this question sounds, it’s not a straightforward one. Who is this book for? There’s an honest answer, a PR answer (for other trans people, for other dykes, for anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider!), and a business answer (non-binary readers between the ages of 18-35, enjoyers of erotica or noir, or, hey, just go check out my Good Reads tags, which lists my book’s genre as transgender, just like me!)2. If a writer is savvy enough to combine the three answers—if they’re even distinct from each other, that is—they may leave the title of writer behind for one with even more earning power: influencer.
I began this series asking, Why do we write? Knowing for whom we write can surely help guide us toward our answer. Perhaps it even is our answer. But these days especially, knowing your audience can also contribute to an existential crisis of the distinctly writerly kind: if you know for whom you write, you’re better equipped to make money off the writing. Some worms can’t be put back in the can.
I’m not saying that the commercialization of art isn’t old as hell, that the dueling compulsions of artistic integrity and making rent don’t dance on our roofs like hot-footing demons. But as it becomes harder and harder to make a living as a writer of, say, fiction3, these considerations become more pertinent to our creative choices. They weigh on them, in fact. Added to the pressure to create ~authentically~ is the pressure to professionalize, both of which are fake problems with very real material consequences. Commodified authenticity is big bucks. Professionalization is job security. Luckily, whole industries—from MFA programs to pay-to-play writing competitions—have popped up to address them, draining the time, money, and energy of aspiring writers looking for a foot in the door.
And so I leave you with a craft exercise, if that’s something you can use. It’s corny, in the way that craft exercises can be, but if you’re having trouble making that descent, maybe it’s a way in: the next time you begin a project, write it as if the only name on the dedication page is your own.
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here.
1“Deal with your shit, this is literature.”—Dennis Cooper
2“I don’t make political art. I don’t make feminist art. I’m a woman who’s a feminist. I don’t make women’s art. I think those categories marginalize anyone’s work. I’m engaged with ideas of power and picturing, of pleasure and punishment, of lives and their beginnings and ends, and how, amid moments of pleasure and tenderness, there are explosions of destruction, subjugation, and the insanity of war.”—Barbara Kruger
3Which I don’t. She has a day job! On top of this newsletter. So, subscribe! I love $5!
March 6, 2023
DAVID: Members Only (unlocked)
The toadstool is tiny because J doesn’t know the dose yet, and anyway I have work in the morning. I chew and swallow, the bitterness lodging in my teeth. It’s snowing, and J and I have plans to go for a nice long walk.
We’re just about to start bundling up when I remember. It’s like being in a car crash: knowing many things at once; the desperate wish to undo; the gaming out of one to three horrifying futures. How could I have forgotten? Within the next few days—maybe even tomorrow—my employer is having my piss analyzed for drug use, and psilocybin is one of the substances the panel will be screening for.
Lose my job. This is more of a sensation than an arrangement of words. I’m going to have to tell Jade that I lost my job because I’m stupid. This is a coherent sentence.
J feels responsible, though of course he shouldn’t. I knew these tests were coming, my first from an employer in over a decade, and yet I ate the mushroom. Still—and I’ve talked about this with him, and with Jade, and in therapy—there is something about J that changes the way I make choices. If only I had waited until after the test to spend time with him, one of the few trans men with whom I feel close. When I came out as trans in my early twenties, I began making friends with other transmasculine people, gay boys like me. When I recloseted not long after, I lost almost all of them except for one very patient and surprisingly self-actualized transfag. My internalized transphobia lived under glass, for all to see; I was not safe for transmasculine people. Even now that I’ve begun the process of fixing my heart, I still get along better with the dolls than with I do with the boys.
I begin to pace J’s living room. How did this happen? Poor timing. Self-sabotage. Pure bad luck. Without laying any blame at J’s feet, I think it’s safe to say that this could only have happened with him. But there’s this too: only J, a sadist, can help me now.
Everyone who meets J likes him instantly. He’s always smiling. You have to make yourself throw up, he advises, smiling. When he says it, I feel less afraid. It seems so simple, and really, it is. They should hire him to deliver cancer diagnoses.
The problem is, I can’t throw up by myself. I broke that mechanism a long time ago. I need help, I tell J. Will you help me? I know he will.
J’s left hand fits down my throat like a glove. His right rests on my shoulder. He presses down with both. You could say he fucks my face. Nothing doing.
Harder, I tell him when I come up for air. Nothing comes out except for some saliva. He teases me for not having a gag reflex.
All that cocksucking, he says.
My laughter squeezes his fingers. I feel grateful that he enjoys my fear and discomfort.
But the gratitude doesn’t cancel out the panic. My stomach is empty and my veins dehydrated, which means there’s almost nothing inside me, other than the mushroom, to be purged. What can I do? It won’t be long before I start metabolizing it.
What grosses you out? J prompts.
The hallmark of a sadist is an instinct to problem-solve. They approach your world of pain and fear like a puzzle, shrinking it down to a more tolerable size. I’m glad J is thinking, because I can’t. What grosses me out? Mold, maybe?
What if I throw up? he asks. Would that work?
This makes me laugh. I’ve been wiping asses and changing menstrual pads my whole life. I’ve spoonfed hundreds of mouths. I’ve listened to pedophiles, sick with post-coital sincerity, admit their crimes. My dad taught me how to eat insects. Your dad paid hundreds of dollars to eat my shit.
Nothing a body can do grosses me out, I tell J.
I’ve been saying this forever, to reassure friends fearful that I might judge them for being human. Now it’s the least reassuring thing I can think of.
J goes to his kitchen and starts opening cabinets. He’s going to make a concoction to disgust me, like the kind you make with your cousins, daring each other to drink the ketchup mixed with orange juice mixed with toothpaste. I chug tap water as he pours unseen liquids and powders into a glass. He stirs it with a spoon, takes a big whiff.
Oh god, he says.
He hands me eight ounces of what looks like rancid salad dressing.
Honestly, it doesn’t smell that bad to me, I say.
He adds a raw egg. For texture, he says, smiling.
Back to the bathroom. I down the drink. Salty, peppery, spicy, mucosal. It’s certainly gross, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it noxious. He tries to purge me again. My throat’s beginning to hurt. My neck will be sore tomorrow, I know. Nothing happens. Nothing comes up.
What about saltwater? J asks.
My mom used to purge that way, I say, remembering.
He mixes me another drink: a finger of kosher salt and more water from the tap.
That’s a lot. J sounds uncertain but he’s still smiling. He and I, similarly complected, are flushed. My face feels bloated. My nose is running.
Not more than a bottle of Gatorade, I say. I don’t think I’m right, but I want to be. At least my stomach is starting to hurt. We go back to bathroom and now I put my own hand down my throat. Still nothing. My desperation is a hum, like fluorescent lights. This is so cool, J keeps saying.
He’s googling on his phone. Ipecac? he asks. I tell him about my history with that stuff. If you don’t know how it works, I promise you, you don’t want to.
I’d rather get fired, I tell him. I really would.
I think I’m the one who suggests gut-punching. I’ve never done it before. Neither has J. Our first time. We stand together by the toilet. I put up my hands up in something like a Don’t shoot gesture and wait, trying not to flinch. J is strong and likes to hit, as I’ve learned from a few scenes together. He’s made me cry before. But right now I’m too tense. It does hurt, but less than you’d imagine, and nothing about it is nauseating. I think about my mom again. One time she and I were playing foosball at her boyfriend’s house. I was losing, and I slammed one of the bars in frustration, hitting her right in the belly. She didn’t say a word, just went and stood outside for a long time.
You’re too ready, J says. I cover my eyes so he can surprise me. The punches hurt more now, but they’re not getting me there. I think we’re having too much fun.
You don’t do anything, J remarks. If I was you, I wouldn’t be able to not swing back.
That’s the difference between you and me, I say. And thank god for that.
Now that gut-punching has failed, I think about the pro-ana/pro-mia forums I used to hang out on when I was a kid. What about a toothbrush? I wonder. It’s so basic. J pulls one out of a fixture in the bathroom wall. The bottom has been whittled to a sharp point.
Why? I ask.
So it’ll fit, he says, pointing to the tiny hole in the fixture. He’s such a boy.
I go back to the toilet and he stands behind me, right behind me, to watch. That’s nice. I feel like I can show him anything. I could drop my pants and take a shit right now and he wouldn’t care. Maybe it’s everything else, maybe it’s the way emergencies relax me, but with the toothbrush (the business end, not the sharp one), I finally start to feel sick. I puke five or six times, spicy water burning my nose. Reverse Bloody Mary. Euphoria.
I stop to take a breath. Doesn’t this gross you out? I ask him.
Nope, J says. He examines the toilet bowl carefully, like he’s reading sheet music. We’ve talked about limits before, and ours are about the same: no shit. Everything else is on the table. Increasingly so, it would seem.
That’s it! I yell. Nutty brown specks in the clear yellow. I puke a few more times, just to make sure. The brown specks look like money to me.
You don’t have to, says J, but I insist. He finds some Clorox wipes and I carefully clean the toilet, inside and out. I drop the wipes in the water. You can’t flush those, he says. He fishes them out with his hand.
Now I just wait, I say. If I don’t come up, we’ll know we got it all.
The scene is over. We clean ourselves up. We put on our hats and coats. I feel silly and spacey and good, and hope it’s just endorphins, the purger’s cozy high. J keeps checking my eyes. I think ours are the same color. His are already dilating, but he says mine are still normal.
The snow falls like a Christmas movie. Winter comes to New York City, said the news this morning. It’s the last day of February. I fear the future every moment, but right now it doesn’t matter. As we make our way to the Manhattan Bridge, J points at slick garbage bags and raging steam vents and red light bulbs hanging from abandoned buildings. His smile shines. I can’t see their beauty in the way he can, so I know I’m safe.
The next day, he texts to check in on me. My toilet has never been so clean, he says.
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Legal disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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