Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

He stroked his throat until the bump relented and then he checked his look in the full-length mirror. How could he look so pretty? His black engineer boots and snug Levi’s jacket, big fur-lined Lenny Kravitz coat—every detail was good, was right. Who was he? He was Ginsberg and Streisand and Kim Gordon rolled into one. He was the girl he wanted to fuck. He clumsily applied silvery pale-pink lipstick. He raked black mascara through his lashes. He tugged his shaggy hair past his shoulders, then experimentally flipped this new long hair, but he didn’t have the knack and he hurt his neck slightly but looked good. Now, he thought, as Patti Smith serenaded a girl called Gloria.

Kim gordon and patti smith reference within the first chapter... This book was made for me.

The jukebox blasted “Black Hole Sun” into the wood paneling.

Stimming

He took a place against the bar and observed with amusement and pride every dyke who walked up the stairs to the room where they had shows. My sisters, he thought.

The black walls were covered in crinkly aging band posters: Sugar, Iowa Beef Experience, 7 Year Bitch, Mike Watt.

This is so awesome and niche and just for me

Paul stared back. She was clearly the band’s pin-up, scrubbed clean under the torn tee shirt and jeans, a stoic masculine beauty. Girls in the audience screamed as the band ripped into a cover of “Fox on the Run.”

Lesbianism and sweet reference this is literally so me i think the author stepped into my brain to write this

I am being penetrated by punk, he thought as she thrust into him, pushing his legs apart,

“Do you like the Smiths?” said Paul, and he stepped through the snow like a delicate horse. “Not really my thing,” said the visiting writer somewhat abruptly.

Smiths hate hallelujah

“Think about it,” said Paul. “When women cover songs by men, they don’t swap the pronouns. Is this a.) a lack of anxiety about convention, b.) a biologically essential fluidity native to humans with vaginas and/or two X chromosomes, c.) rampant queerness among women singers, or d.) the universal male default?” “Um, C?” said Dallas. “Yes!” Paul cried. “It is all that and more. Usually the gender reversal of the singer deliciously implies queer desire, as in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Dear Prudence,’ The Slits’ ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ Joan Jett’s ‘Crimson and Clover,’ Everything But The Girl’s ‘Alison,’ or Patti Smith’s ‘Gloria,’ in which her seductive gutterpunk vocals make the Van Morrison original sound as played-out as the locker-room boasts of a high-school football star.”

Certainly the implication here is that all gender is performance—a pure Butlerian moment.

Hip hop uses samples as material from which to make art, whereas rock uses covers to foreground identity, performance itself the art.

Dallas might be a drug-dealing skateboard punk rocker right now, but at heart he was an American, at heart he was a normal straight boy. He’d cover all his tattoos with a suit at his Texas wedding. Paul wouldn’t even be invited. Paul was repulsive, apart from the human flow of life; Paul was sitting alone outside waiting for a ride that would never come.

Was biology destiny, in fact? That might really fuck up not only her identity but her dissertation.

“It’s darling,” said Jane, and immediately experienced a spasm of impostor shame. She knew she camped it up around Paul, and wondered if he camped it up around her, if they were anxious collaborators in a consolidation of something supposedly shared rather than actual friends. She wondered if anyone had any real friends, when it came to that. How could straight people, for instance, have real friends when their entire lives were an inhabitation of a myth? She felt better, as she always did when she brought herself around to a critique of the heteropatriarchy. Paul hadn’t noticed anything; he was admiring himself in a large wood-framed mirror studded with antlers. The jacket fit him so well Jane was annoyed, then guilty.

Paul chafed at this second coming out, at being in again at all, and so suddenly. Is it endless? he thought, like Russian nesting dolls, with no tiny solid center?

He located a single can of Squirt, which he bought for the name.

“Ah yes,” said the old fox. “Hmm. There is more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?” “I don’t know,” said the wolf, sadly. “I don’t know what I am.”

“I love L7,” Paul said. Dykes were so cool. What could be more punk than being a dyke? What better way to say fuck you to the Man?

“Then we’ll just have to hang out,” said Diane, and Paul felt a flutter of shyness, a shy girl flutter, the flutter of not knowing if he was making a friend or something else. This was a strange experience for him, for whom all were prey, and he located the feeling in his new body. He was now having girl-feelings. Weird.

His skin was electric, buzzing, humming like drugs, like fear, like New York City sidewalks, like any moment before any time he’d ever kissed anyone important. Paul breathed in the walk-in-closet smell of the forest floor and waited for dark, toggling between the pleasures of trusting and fearing a stranger, as they walked and walked.

He just wanted a lark, to pass, to pass among all these women, to sleep with a bunch of people. And now this girl was looking at him, and seeing something he either was or wasn’t.

How long could he stay a girl without relaxing?

“Can’t I just be a femme?” said Paul. Jane rolled her eyes. “Seriously,” said Paul. “I think I’m a femme.” “You’re not a femme,” said Jane. “Trust me.” Paul wondered if she was right.

They were all women, except him, including him. No one was looking at him strangely. He was being paranoid. He was a girl, just like these girls. And they were all so hot and, yes, beautiful.

Paul wasn’t sure how he felt. Jane was angry about something that didn’t bother him.

“Thank you for saving my life,” he said, to say something. He sat down. “You’re too beautiful to die,” Diane said, so Paul guessed he’d said the right thing. “I don’t want you to die.” “I don’t want you to die, too,” said Paul. He hadn’t been thinking about death but now he was. He reached for her hand and pulled her down so they were facing each other on the grass. “Let’s never die.” “Everyone dies sometime,” said Diane. “We’ll be in the earth, one with everything. But not until we’re very old.” “Okay,” said Paul, with a little thrill. “When we’re very old.” He’d never said “we” to anyone before, not even Tony Pinto, with whom he’d thought but not spoken words like “we” and “very old.” Now Diane had said the words, and they were bound to each other in this field, like a hippie wedding. He didn’t know what else to say, so he pulled her on top of him.

“Stop,” said Paul. “Don’t mock. I actually feel like I belonged there as much as anywhere I’ve ever been. More even.”

Jane had tape-to-tape, for one thing, and lots of vinyl, and everything the Pixies had ever released. Fags 0, Dykes 1.

Maybe if he hooked up Jane’s VCR to another VCR and rented all the movies…He felt that old familiar electricity surging up in him, a desire to accumulate and then display a complete collection. He imposed a small measure of self-control and returned his attention to the mixtape.

Okay, what should the first song be on the second side? You’ve got that moment where the tape reverses, the antici…pation, and so the first song on the second side is the heart of the tape. By that point, you’re committed; you’ve listened to an entire side and you’ve entered the world of the tape—you’ve waited, and what are you waiting for? He decided to go for a declaration. Forget subtlety. His tape would be a manifesto of his readiness. He wanted to be Diane’s girlfriend, whatever that meant.

The last song fit exactly on the tape. If that wasn’t a sign, Paul didn’t know what was. Diane was a Kool Thing. She did walk like a panther. They both were like fuck you to male white corporate oppression. Paul thought about how hot they looked together in the Polaroids they’d taken at Michigan. He couldn’t believe he was one of the hot girls in the pictures but there he was, four times a lady.

“Play something good,” said Paul, brandishing the Yeastie Girls/Consolidated 12" of “You Suck.”

Omg tv girl

“Look,” he said. “I’m like you.” He took her hands and placed them on his soft soft cheeks. She touched his face forensically, like an insurance inspector. He searched her face back. What was she thinking? She looked like Colossus, her face and body turned to steel. Where was his Peter Rasputin? he thought. Where are you in there? “I’m like you,” he said again. “You’re not like me,” Diane said. “I don’t lie.” “It’s not that simple,” said Paul.

He didn’t understand this sarcastic Diane, at once familiar and yet so not herself. He’d brought her to this point, he thought, his fear mixed with a secret surprising pride. He’d broken down her cool reserve.

“I’m the girl you met at Michigan, the girl who can’t stop thinking about you, the girl who wants to be your girlfriend.”

“Mmm, you smell amazing,” Diane said. Then: “Oh! I think…Oh, I just figured something out.” “What?” Paul said, bracing himself. “You always smell the same,” said Diane. “You smelled the same last night when I first saw you as you do now.” The waitress approached, smiling the smile of liberal tolerance, and showed them to a booth, where they sat across from each other holding hands. “Really? I smell the same?” Paul said, nodding his desire for coffee to the waitress. “Don’t I smell somewhat less like smoke and beer after that shower?” “No,” said Diane. “I mean you smell like a girl all the time. You didn’t smell like a boy before. You can’t fake pheromones. I think you’re really female. Like, chemically or something.” “That’s cool,” said Paul. “I think that must be true.” “Did you always know you were a girl?” Diane asked. The waitress came back, took their order, and left. Paul thought. Had he always been a girl?— ×

Paul remembered Stevie Nicks’s voice, how his voice should sound, and the promise of her name, a secret way around the problem of what to be called. Paul remembered Halloween.

Paul remembered seeing a picture of Patti Smith for the first time, that flash of recognition when he first came across the Mapplethorpe postcard at the gay bookstore in Binghamton, thinking that’s what he looked like on the inside, taping that postcard up in every room he’d lived in since.

Paul remembered alibis and secret victories: he remembered dressing up as one of the guys from KISS to wear makeup; he remembered pretending to like punk rock in order to pierce his ears; he remembered New Wave eyeliner.

Paul remembered the time he had sex with Heather Federson, how jealous he was she got to feel a dick inside her, how she got to feel hands on her breasts.

Paul remembered reading about British public school boys, and how they had to act the girl parts in their school plays, and how it was no big deal.

“Oh yes,” she said. “As long as it’s permanently unclear what it means, I’ve always been a girl.”

The first tape you ever got from someone was always an adjustment in how you thought of them, an insight into how they saw themselves.

Diane was much cooler than Paul had originally thought; she wasn’t secretly cool, she was actually cool. She was an artist, not just a fan. He wondered if she’d still like him after they spent six weeks together. She knew some of what he was, but not all.

He was entering his last days of boyhood, at le...

He felt the old desperation. What if he couldn’t get out of this town again, was somehow trapped here while all the other fun people were hanging out together somewhere else? He mentally assembled a soundtrack for the depressing stretch of highway between Albany and Troy—mostly Skinny Puppy or KMFDM—and then for Troy itself, where abandoned liters of Crystal Pepsi tumbleweeded down the empty streets.

What was sex but newness? And sensation and conquest and intrigue and desire and romance and fantasy, and specific people sometimes, sure, but not always.

And it was fun to put his dick inside her, a different kind of masturbation, and she was sarcastic and had cute clothes, and so what if he couldn’t ever fall in love with her? She didn’t love him either, and wouldn’t. She was proving something on him too. Boys were harder, easier, more dangerous, and mostly Paul just wanted them more, but something was better than nothing, when it came to sex, and always, always he was curious. As a kid he’d been as interested in girls’ bodies as boys’: the thrill of information versus the thrill of the unspeakable.

What he shared with the gay men he met later was the claustrophobia of doing what everyone else did. He had the prison nightmares of his bedroom shrinking, of living in a ranch house outside Albany with some expectant and then expecting woman asking him to fix the car and mow the lawn and go to a job and come back and never do anything fun. Heterosexuality = marriage = death, Paul knew.

When Paul first fled Troy he didn’t get far, just two hours away to Binghamton, home of the safety school. He’d applied to NYU and Bennington, places he’d heard mentioned in conjunction with gays or artists, but not Vassar or Sarah Lawrence—even expressing an interest in places like those was tantamount to a declar...

He dropped out and planned to spend a summer in Troy, saving money, but when he took the train down to New York City for Pride, he knew he couldn’t go back.