Prelude: Going the Distance

The arena is empty except for one man
Still driving and striving as fast as he can
The sun has gone down and the moon has come up
Not long ago somebody left with the cup
But he's driving and striving an hugging the turns
And thinking of someone for who he still burns
He's going the distance
He's going for speed

Cake




I have never been a man.

Used to be I could say that statement and not have to explain it more. But the miracles of modern day science forces me to elaborate. Though I was born a man with man parts, I have never once considered myself a man. I have spent the greater portion of my life knocking from door to metaphorical door asking those who bother to answer if just one of them could please tell me if I was a man. Those who did, I didn't believe. Those who couldn't answer, I put down as a no. And in all my life, there has only been one who said I wasn't. The ironic part is, he may have been the only person I really needed to hear it from.

When I was younger I looked like a girl. Once again I want to stress the man parts, but I am pretty sure it is more me being self conscious than actually making a point. My mother, the lost hippie she was, never allowed me to get my hair cut. I had long, shoulder length hair that most of the time was pulled back into a ponytail or flying freely behind me as I ran from one point to another. It is an unnatural sight to see such a young boy with very long hair; it is even more unnatural to be the young boy in question. I had these huge hazel-green eyes and eyelashes drag queens would die for. My name was James Brandon, but just barely. My mother wanted to name me Triton, I suppose my mother being of the mind that growing up was not challenging enough, she wanted to give me a handicap of sorts to level the playing field. My grandmother, who said the rosary every day of her adult life as far as I knew, insisted on a Bible name if she had anything to say about it. Considering my mother was barely 17 at the time it turned out she had quite a lot to say about it. While my slept from the liberal dose of sedatives given to her after my birth my grandmother told them my name was James. After hearing that my mother gave up on Triton but opted for Brandon instead. So I became James Brandon. But in one of those funny, funny twists of life, that became Brandy.

At home with my mom and her stoner friends Brandy was what I was called. James was a name for being introduced to people I didn't know and for forms I didn't know what they were for. James was more a title and Brandy was my name. Of course being small and unworldly, I had no idea just how wrong a name that was for a boy. I actually thought it was pretty cool. Brandy was my name, my persona, it was who I always thought of myself as. We lived in this old trailer park commune; the Hippie's Graveyard; the place where old stoners went to die after they got rid of Nixon. My mom had this huge blue bus that served as our house of sorts. Her room was the top floor complete with the standard hippy pillow and candle vibe going on. I slept downstairs on a modified bed, seat cushion thing. I had no idea we lived in an old bus, to me it was just my house. Our refrigerator was outside, right next to the vegetable garden and marijuana field she tended. The bathroom/shower was a huge public area that had showers and stalls. I was five before I realized that everyone didn't go to the bathroom with everyone else. Needless to say it was an odd place to grow up. It was a collection of people who all wanted to be more than neighbors but less than family. It was the last gasps of an era where people trusted people because they thought they should and the last group of people who fought the never ending capitalism of the 80's. I grew up sheltered within those walls, nurtured by the entire complex in free love and world peace. There was no school, we were all taught in a small room set aside for parents who weren't too stoned to come in and tell us how the world was. There was a small group of kids there and we grew up together, in a very real sense that the entire world was just like this. I had my first kiss within those walls, went on adventures with my friends, trekking through shoulder length weeds to the abandoned barn at the edge of the property. We would scare ourselves crazy with ghost stories and then run back to hide under the trailers and listen to our parents sound the fool after smoking the strange smell smoke. We laughed, we cried, we loved. It was a nice life. A life that most people today have no idea how it feels. In our everyday all knowing, all seeing 24 hour a day information overload it is becoming rarer and rarer to find the quiet spots of blissful ignorance where true innocence comes from.

My mother, as she was prone to do, decided that she needed to be someone else. She decided that free love and world peace were not going to come out the winner in this round, in fact it wasn't even going to reach the finish line. In the end true love would be slain in the name of AIDS and world peace would some day come crashing down in two towers of blood and ash. Though it was impossible to know all that then, my mom know which way the wind was blowing and decided to hop ship. She sold the bus, bought a van and we moved in the middle of the night. The first time in my life I watched my life and security grow smaller in the back window of a car with my mother telling me it was going to be much better in the next place. It was the first time I was forced to leave without saying good bye to the ones I loved. It was the first time I have my heart broken.

But not the last.



She ended up moving in with this guy named Clay. Clay was like no person I had ever met before. He was tall, gawky, soft spoken with this twang. He was this kind of backwards reject from Texas who was a genius when it came to electronics but not too many marbles in anything else. When he met my mother he was living in a small apartment filled with take out food and empty shirt wrappers from Sears. It seemed Clay didn't have the time to do the little extras in life, like wash dishes and do the laundry. So we ordered out and bought a stack of new shirts every week. In Clay's brain this was a simple answer to an impossible problem. To me it was the first of about a thousand flashing lights. My mom seemed to love Clay, at least as much as she was able to love anyone. They both smoked a lot of pot and played Jefferson Airplane way too loud. I could tell Clay wasn’t too hot about me and had gathered I was the reason they didn't just go and get married. I knew I was different so I simply assumed he was standoffish to me because He was a little bit country and I was...well just weird. I had grown up around adults, adults who spent the first part of their life trying to overthrown establishment so found that the whole parent/child relationship was fascist. So I had always been treated like a little adult instead of a child. Because of that I wasn’t scared of adults at all. I didn't have that hesitation of awe and respect that kids have for adults, I didn’t think they were any better or smarter than me. Just taller. I talked to them as equals and expected them to do the same.

Clay expected something else entirely.

Clay expected a seen and not heard kid. He expected a small, not intrusive thing that cleaned up after itself and said please and thank you. What he got was me. We didn't hit it off at all and it only compounded things when it was decided that I should enter public school. I am not sure what my mother thought I was going to do about learning, It wasn't like either one of them were around enough to home school a hamster much less a child. I was smart for my age so I think it was simply assumed I would learn what I needed to know and that was enough. The State of California was not impressed with enough. So there was a discussion which turned into a debate that ended up becoming a full blown argument. In the end I was sentenced to public school and there were no if and's or buts about it.



The school was called Steele Lane and frankly I don't remember much of it. I get images from it. The long hallways, the scratched and beaten wooden doors, the smiling faces of teachers I can't remember any more. I don't remember much about it, but I remember the fight. I remember the last time I was called Brandy.

I can’t remember the name of the kid, but I recall I was wearing a baby blue t-shirt with a rainbow on it. Like most of my clothes, it was a walking billboard for the summer of love and understanding. There was little I owned that did not have a peace sign or a rainbow or a unicorn on it. My pants were worn jeans with little patches sewn onto them. Two fingers in the universal sign for peace in blue and white over one pocket, a yellow smiley face on another knee. I realized I didn't dress like anyone else in school but it really hadn't dawned on me yet that conformity was the will of the land. I grew up in a world that expressed and rewarded individuality, there my clothes had been works of art, living canvases of what I thought of myself and the world. Here they were just weird. I had been in school for almost a week, and so far I hadn’t put together that the laughing I heard was about me. I had assumed that the kids were just..well laughing. I hadn’t been laughed at in my life. I had been laughed with, played with….but never laughed at. The thought that someone would be so cruel as to laugh at someone else with malice wasn't an occurrence I had come across yet.

So it was a shock the day I saw them pointing and laughing. I liked to laugh and though I didn't get the allure of pointing so much I understood that there must be something funny around. So like the clueless kid I was I looked around to see what was so funny myself. After all whatever could cause a group of kids to point and laugh must be good. I did a full 360, like a dog looking for my tail trying to find a clown or maybe an amusing picture on a wall. Finding nothing I looked back to the pack of now hysterical kids with confusion. Perhaps I had misjudged the direction of their point or was just not getting the joke.

Turns out I indeed never got the joke.

“You’re a girl !”, the now nameless boy called out.

Now as insults go, for small boys go this one is a volatile one. In fact with large boys this one is a doozy. Anyone with a penis can tell you that the last thing in the world you ever want to be is a girl. No idea why. Couldn’t tell you then, can’t explain it now. But a girl is almost the worst thing a guy can be called to his face.

The worst thing is a faggot but I didn't find that out until years later.

Now still I had no idea this was at expense. I mean I was obviously not a girl, recall the man parts, so either this boy was deficient or maybe a little confused on the whole man parts thing. After all, I was raised in a much more open environment that other people, a place where nudity and talk of sexuality wasn't as taboo. Maybe this kid didn't get the whole man parts talk and had his genders mixed up. After all, I knew some people were just plain stupid and maybe this kid was one of them. Some inbreed sense told me that judging these kids for not knowing certain things or being different from me was wrong, so I held back and tried to figure out what the confusion was about. After all the kids that I had grown up as were all different. Boys, girls, blacks, whites…we were friends. Nothing more and never less. So maybe I was missing a game or a joke that these guys played so no need to get upset. I knew I wasn't a girl, in the same way I wasn't a duck, a goose or even red rover.

“Am not.”, was all I said, it seemed the best way to illustrate my point at the time.

“Are so !! Brandy is a girls name, so you’re a girl !!”

Now I want to point out, this so much as didn’t upset me as shocked me. I mean Brandy wasn’t a girls name, it was my name. I mean if some poor girl had gone out and picked the name Brandy pity her. After all there were freaks who call themselves Alex and the such when Alex was so obviously a boys name. But Brandy, Brandy was a fine male name, I knew this in the same way I knew everything else. I was 6 years old so I had to know everything I needed to know. and the one thing I knew.

I wasn’t a girl.

Well things went downhill in a way that can only happen in 2nd grade. Nameless boy (and doesn’t that say something that I can remember the color of my shirt but not his name…tragic) produced then a girl whose name was Brandy.

This did nothing to phase me. She was one of those poor freak girls I was just talking about. I pitied her having to walk around with the wrong gender's name.

And then he produced a girl whose sister was Brandy. And another who agreed, and another who just laughed. And then came the chant. It was the chant that did it. God as my witness, it was the chant of GIRL, GIRL, GIRL made me snap. The situation had quickly escalated from a harmless childhood prank to something ugly. Something primal. Something that was about to become unforgettable. I remember reading Lord of the Flies for the first time, and there was a boy in class who said that it was unrealistic book. He thought that people were basically good and there was no way that people would sink so low so fast. There was no way a group of civilized people could be transformed into a pack of howling savages so fast. He argued that he just didn't think people in general were that bad. I didn't correct him at the time, but I knew he was wrong. I knew he was dead wrong.

Their laughing had become leers and their mirth had evolved into malice. The one syllable of girl rang out in my head, echoed through me. Chasing the reason and understanding from my head. I felt the truth, the truth I had ignored for so long burn itself away slowly but surely. Each repetition of girl was like a heartbeat, a pulse inside my soul. They were the last beats of an old life coming to an end. It was the start of a transformation that could never be undone. A metamorphosis into something not quite right. It was the end, the end of an innocence.

Now I want to say I told him that he was mistaken in his presumption that names have a gender assigned to them. I want to tell you I took him aside and told him calmly that his mistake was causing me distress and since I had no father to reassure me of my masculinity and manhood it was hitting me in an area that I particularly didn’t want to visit. I want to tell you I smiled and said I get the name is funny, but come on….leave this alone can you ? I wish I could say any of that to you. But I can't.

Instead I hauled off and almost broke his nose.

There was an explosion of blood everywhere. I connected with the fleshy part of his left nostril and there was red everywhere. He went down like a two dollar whore, and I went down right after him. Kids screamed, ran, panicked, did everything but pull me off. This wasn’t a hit and then stand over him and gloat kind of thing. This wasn't just a smack and there you had that coming moment. This was a punishment. This was me making a point. This was a lesson. His head kept making this kind of wet thud sound as I hit him again and again as I straddled him wailing non stop. I was shouting something I am sure though I can't rightfully say there were words involved. They were probably sounds that roughly translated as I am not a girl, or don’t call me that or even I regret that your lack of consideration of my feelings and self esteem has brought us to this unfortunate place and I am sorry for the way your nose will forever point to the right. Well maybe not that, but I am sure I was screaming something.

Far too late for nameless kid an adult appeared to pull us apart. Like a flood more and more appeared. There were cried of shock and amazement as they held me back as they tried to see how bad he was. The school nurse hovered over him tying to stop the ever present rush of blood from where his nose looked like it should be. I swung and kicked against my unseen jailer. He had hauled me off my feet, my little legs kicking in the pure wraith of the moment. I wasn’t done with him, I hadn’t made my point yet, I hadn't made him hurt enough. The teacher held me effortlessly, but I could see that look on their faces. The look for complete shock and terror that this level of violence was being displayed by a child not even a decade old. No one said anything, the only sounds were the inarticulate raging of a 6 year old who had last something he was never going to get back.

They took him to the nurse's office and me to the principals office. My mom was called and words were spoken. Lord knows what was said, I am not sure how you tell someone your child has assaulted another child like I had. All I know was that my mom was completely sure that they had the wrong kid that she was ready to fight the school itself. She showed up in a cloud of outrage and denial. She knew her child, she knew what kind of kid I was. There was no way her little peace, love flower child could be responsible for this. An error had been made somewhere and she wasn't budging until it had been found. She was ready for all of that until I mumbled the three words that changed the way me and my mom dealt with each other forever after.

“I did it.”

I suppose my mom lost a little of her innocence that day as well as she realized for the first time, she might not know me at all. There were papers signed and words hurried back and forth, all of them outside of my comprehension. All I knew was that there was a lot of fuss being made over a bloodied nose and none made my the death of my self image. I was resentful of the whole thing but knew enough to keep my mouth shut since no one was interested in my point of view at the moment.

We were silent the entire ride home. It was a silence that me and mom were to grow used to later in our life. It was like a passenger we had picked up on the way, a hitchhiker that had found his way into our car and then into our lives. He sat in between us and stared at me with unrelenting scrutiny, that kind that made you focus on that small point on the floor and hope it will enlarge and swallow you up forever. It had that kind of stare than can make you actually flush with its intensity as you realize how much trouble you were in. The silence was all that and more. And it lasted forever.

For the next few years we drove in that car, back to our house. I had centuries to ponder the weight of my actions and the severity of my crime. It was dawning on my that I had crossed a line but I couldn't get past the point of my pain. Sure he couldn't breath properly and all but no one even asked me why I did it. No one cared about me. As soon as the car stopped I barreled out and ran straight to my room. My bed creaked as I threw myself into it and wished that the entire world would just stop spinning and let me fly off, far away from all this. I smelt like his blood, my shirt was now some odd hue of purple that can only be reproduced with baby blues and bodily fluids. There was something sad about the rainbow half destroyed with fresh blood drawn in anger. It was a far more honest expression of my life than the rainbow ever was.

I sat in my room, the walls darkening around me as the sun took it’s leave from the scene. I just lied there and must have dozed off cause the next thing I remember is my door creeping open for someone to check on me. I was ready for my mom, my grandfather, hell even the Easter Bunny I would have welcomed at this point.

Instead I got Clay.

He was still in that horrible white, short sleeve work shirt that everyone seemed to wear in the 70’s. His pocket was filled with pens and various devices. He looked pissed, that was obvious, but that anger vanished the second I sat up and he saw my shirt. Even an idiot could tell it wasn’t my blood.

“What did you do ?”, he asked, no longer an adult looking after my welfare but a human being who had to know how bad this car wreck was.

“He started it !”, I wailed, invoking the age old child protection excuse. If Oswald had been 10 years old the first words to the Dallas Police would have been he started it. If they were 10 they would have released him.

“What in the world could he have started that warranted”, and here the words failed him because there was no simple word for the mess that was my shirt. Instead he simply gestured towards the stain, ”warranted that ?”

The scream came deep within me. It wasn’t a scream about the fight, it wasn’t scream about the blood, my mom, the trouble or even towards Clay. The scream came from that part in me where my dad lived. Not that he lived, my dad had never lived. My dad was like Atlantis and Bigfoot, nice stories but no proof that either was more than a myth. The scream wasn’t for me, wasn’t for Clay, the scream was for my father…and I was hoping he could hear me.

“I AM NOT A GIRL !!!!!”

And once again the silence me and mom had picked up had made himself home in my room. Sat between me and Clay for several minutes. He looked back and forth between us. A small child whose eyes were windows into a world of hurt, pain and everything he never had. No one to show me how to throw a ball. No one to ruffle my hair when I came in the house muddy from playing. No one to tell me that girls one day would be a huge part of my life, no one to tell me that yes in fact I would some day be a man. A world without validation. A world without acceptance. And for a second I think Clay got it. Not out of sympathy or out of love for me. He got it because he was a man, and men know how incredibly stupid other men can be.

“No you aren’t You are indeed not a girl. Why would someone think you were ?”

“They said my name is a girls name !”

“They said James was a girl’s name ?”

“My name is Brandy.”

And the entire event was summed up in one syllable, “Ah.”

The ah wasn’t what I was expecting, it sure wasn't what I needed. I was wanting more along the line of , as yes Brandy, from the very masculine explorer or it comes from the warrior Brandy the 3rd who dominated everything for over million years and everyone thought was cool. The ah didn’t really sum it up at all. The ah left something open that surprisingly close to the very same thing that had been coming to me as they chanted girl. A truth that was just outside of reach but coming closer with each tick of the clock.

“Well, well Brandy is…”and he faltered. I think at that point Clay really did understand I wasn’t some small creature that just looked human, it was at that point he understood I was a tiny human being that had tiny feelings and wasn’t some weird pet that the chick he was fucking dragged around with her. Right there he understood what and who I was. Of course it was also at that moment Clay decided to leave my mom. That took months of agony and fighting and screaming and cheating with my friend’s mom which left me in the weirdest place a 6 year old boy can be in when you’re friends with the kid whose mom your step dad is banging in the next room. But that was later, now it was the moment he knew how hard this was going to be. How much it was going to take to raise a kid like me. He knew that at that moment what he said would change my life, and define what I saw myself and the world saw me as. And I think in Clay’s defense, he panicked. He wasn’t my dad, he didn’t even like me much, I was a moody kid that spoke far to close to an adult and I used words he didn’t think should come from a 6 year old and frankly….

Frankly I looked like a girl to him.

“Brandy is a girl’s name. For God’s sake why would you go to school and call yourself Brandy. And look at your hair, you look like a girl. Do you think little boys run around with rainbows on their shirt ? Do you think they draw pictures of unicorns and talk about this crap. They play baseball and they dress normal and they don’t have girls hair. If you beat some kid up because he said you looked like a girl or you had a girl’s name…”

And this is it, my first death right there. It is the first time I realized that I was going to be able to be me, and I started making someone else in my mind. It was the last time I ever thought it was alright to be just me, so I started to become him. The other me.

“…well if he said that he was right. You do look like a girl.”

And with that small part of my life destroyed he walked out of my room, and my life for that matter. Clay ceased being a human after that. A lot of people ceased being human in fact. My mom, my grandparents, the kids at school, everyone. They were like objects, objects of flesh I passed during the day. They didn't understand me and I didn't understand them. I thought it prudent that we interact as little as possible to avoid any further confusion. I spent the next few days at home, my mom a faceless blur of voice and movement that in the end meant nothing to me.

I got a haircut that week, went to Sears and found the harsher side of me. Brown corduroy slacks with button up shirts. Hideous looking back on it, but I fit in. And fitting in is what you're supposed to do. So it was what I did. It wasn't the first time I needed a man to tell me I was a man, and the last time it ever mattered that much. It was the declaration that all others that came after were based on, and if Clay had given me just one moment...one word...

Should've, would've could've...


I have spent the rest of my life wondering if I was enough. The same silent race that men run with themselves in an endless competition that like any track leaves you right where you started. My life has been that race between trying to catch the image of my father and outrunning the truth of what I was. Stuck in the middle with nowhere to go, I was left with only one choice in my life. The only choice left to me.



I kept running.