The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

Everything else about Ray Lampert was clean, sterilized, the bleached teeth, the rehearsed smile, the expensive clothes, but that chest hair belonged to an animal.

consciously choose my eyeliner and septum piercing and long hair as a disguise, but in retrospect that is exactly what they were. I knew I could not pass as straight, but I thought perhaps I could pass as “just weird.” No, I wanted nothing to do with that fey boy who accepted himself, and it pains me now to wonder how my life would have gone had I been psychologically sound enough to have made friends with him and begun so much earlier the hard work of attempting to love myself.

It was then that I understood that these encounters were fundamentally about loneliness, flashes of intense intimacy so awkward and fragile that they had no place in real life.

As often as I was failing to pass as a straight boy during those years, Bunny was failing to pass as a girl.

I loved him impersonally, abstractly, like a character in a book who, by virtue of their very distance from you, their belonging to a different world that you may never yourself enter, enflames your longing all the more.

and it was awkward that they were buying things and I was selling things, that they had money to spend on items they didn’t need, and I needed money so badly that I was wearing a blue smock.

Was I a good guy? Was Terrence a good guy? In many ways he was the kindest person I knew, but I also was aware that he was nothing but a sad, doped-up manager at a small-town Rite Aid, and that if he was the best guy I knew then there was really no hope at all for anyone.

He was a corny, corny man, and he appalled me, and I loved him, the deal clinched in my heart before I could object.

And maybe if I were the me I am today, I wouldn’t have found that so compelling. But the idea of someone wanting to know me, to know the real me, to see me as I was when I was so invisible and so dedicated to my own invisibility—it was everything I’d ever wanted and always assumed I would never have.

The most disconcerting part of it for me was that I had never had the experience of being both sexually turned on and happy at the same time. I kept thinking something was wrong. I kept breaking out giggling.

“We’re all gonna be having nightmares for the rest of our lives,” I said. That was how young I was. I thought I would never forget. I didn’t know how things faded, became simple facts, until they were things you hardly thought of anymore.

“They had a kid together,” I said, but I wasn’t even sure what such a bond entailed. My own father had seemed to find it easy enough to let us go.

My mom said it’s different when it’s the woman who’s violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it’s natural for a guy to just ‘lose his temper,’ but if a woman does the same thing, then it’s a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically.”

If the gossip spread far and fast enough, it would enter my household, and I was genuinely uncertain if I would still be allowed to keep living there once Aunt Deedee knew that my sexuality was no longer merely theoretical (and therefore clean, sympathetic even), but now actual (and therefore dirty, saturated with human fluid, dangerous).

Didn’t her lawyer know that the only thing harder to win than a rape case is a woman defending herself in a domestic violence dispute?

For me, watching my mother give up during her trial and fall into the depression that consumed her throughout her prison sentence was a betrayal of such epic proportions that it became one of the great before-and-afters of my life.

but I will refuse you the comfort of your normal bed, on this, one of the worst nights of your life, in order to appease his bigotry and coddle his feelings of superiority to you.

What is wrong with you? I thought in the dark, after she had gone, as I listened to the fan in the refrigerator cycle on and off, over and over. Why can’t you accept that this is what love is like?

It is a wild move you unexpectedly bust out, a sudden change in tempo, and so a “freak of nature” is more a jaunty deviation from the norm than a sign that God is mad. In other words, I had always looked at Bunny as a freak, a beautiful, exciting, pulsating freak. But now Bunny worried she was a monster. Because on some level she had always seen herself that way.

unencumbered.

It was my otherness that so angered those boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn’t understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrence couldn’t understand me and it made him want to save me.

On the worst possible day of your life, which is the day you are arrested, you would think people could be a little softer with you, but they aren’t. It’s like you’re not human at all anymore. You got yourself into this and now it’s just fucking funny or it’s just fucking life.

kismet,

“Do you forgive him?” I really wanted to know. I did not forgive him. In fact, the more time passed, the more my heart calcified against him. “Some thoughts are just too expensive to have,” she said.

They just got sort of stuck in a thought cycle, and if you were interrupting it or contradicting it, they literally could not hear you. They would do anything to just cycle through the thoughts again and stoke the anger and the hurt.

anathema

“Not a crybaby,” she said, “not a crybaby. But like…an artist that doesn’t make anything. You study yourself. You study life instead of living it. And everything you feel is like a fine wine and you sniff it and swish it around and in the end you barely fucking drink it.”