Ponyboy

by Eliot Duncan

Still, the binder’s heavy compression allows me to move, to assert my boyhood with less fear.

I move freer in their company, in the comfort and simultaneous ache of knowing someone so well for so long. More and more, they show me I could exist, that I could live. They allow the light of me to come forth, giving grace to even the shame of me. My truth able to arise, unmuffled and frank. It’s not your shame, they’d say, it doesn’t belong to you. Never has.

A man without a shirt jogs down the middle of the road and I vanish into envy for his flat chest.

Gendered ontologies are productive, categorical fictions. To be is the same as to be treated as. I say, To be treated as is to be?

What was I for Halloween? Yourself, Toni said with a laugh, and no one recognized you.

“Werde, der du bist.”

What can I do with all this desire except go forward with it in my palms?

Most of the time, the future felt like an obscure projection I was afraid to want because there wasn’t evidence of future me anywhere, in life or in fiction.

She’d say secret dreams to me: Please, cum inside me. She’d call me Daddy. In our clothed lives, though, she was slow to call me boyfriend. She’d always insist that she wasn’t straight, which left me shrugging: Neither am I. Which left her asking, Then what? Then everything, I’d think, then none and each. Then I’m a sky close to ocean, an ocean close to sky.

As I approached, I heard Baby say, She’s here. The “she,” I knew, was meant to mean me. Beautiful with hurt, I sat down.

It’s about being trans, she began. I mean, I’m sure you’re aware of all these butch women becoming men. Don’t you think we need to make a separate definition of butch?

Does it feel like something is being taken from you? No, Sophia said, no, but you, for example, you are moving away from butch into, well, manhood. I think being butch is a gorgeous, expansive thing, I told her. Who would a separate definition be for anyway? Some people are trans and some people transition and that’s not your loss, I thought. That’s not anyone’s loss. I don’t know what new definition is required, I said. You’re talking about yourself as if you are everyone, Baby said, with her hand firm on my leg.

met Sophia’s mind again and tried nervously: I don’t think masculinity belongs to anyone, like, there isn’t one right way to do it. Sophia looked at me blankly, then furrowed as if in thought. I couldn’t understand why my boyness warranted material for discussion.

Sophia needed, somehow, to consult me on her separatist definitions. There’s not one way to be masculine, sure, Sophia agreed. But becoming a man, that’s a crossing over. I looked at Baby, who looked at Sophia. I knew then that I didn’t get to be one of th...

Where I could exist at full volume, where the fact of me wasn’t a disruption but an unquestioned, integrated fact of my being.

Mom always wanted me to want to be beautiful. My bare feet hitting concrete, I was the fastest runner in the neighborhood.

Dad and I were going for a run, right here. Saturday morning. A hot one. I took off my T-shirt. My heart, kicking under a gray sports bra. Wind graced my stomach, shoulders and arms as I tried to steady my breath, I could feel the wings of me unfold. He told me to put my shirt back on. I felt like he hated me. I hated this me too. I spit mucus on the hot sidewalk and let him run ahead. With my furnace eyes, I yelled: You wanted to be a chef but the condom broke, now I’m here.

All my philo profs gesture at this thing called choice. What fucking choice do any of us have? The way cells form in utero become imperatives for living.

The whole of gender is this: subjects socialized to behave, to identify, to believe in an ontological separation based on anatomy.

Me: I think I know God. I’ve come close enough. I had to kill parts of myself every day to be girl. Acker: God is nothing but transcendence of body, maybe sex is an act of God. Me: See, you fuck to leave your body, I fuck to get into mine.

When I was boy I knew what I would be. Just something big. Something where you stand tall and smile and think and run and sweat. But then the world got smaller. Details got bigger. Hems and eyelashes and shoes. What happened was they all said I was girl. I tried to believe them.

I know by the way I shove them against the cold bathroom tile wall and bite down into the warm sky of their neck that they don’t read me, they don’t fuck me, they don’t experience me as woman. Toni and I go on, navigating the surfaces of our queer flesh. Naming for ourselves, our selves. Toni’s core is ocean. My cock is a swelling mast. We fuck with bruising grip, becoming true.

I have a room of my own. We can share it. We can go to lectures. There are queer people on the street. They drive past this man vs. woman thing, see it’s all cracking open. Smirks and turns and thousands of palms to the imperatives of gender. Dora, they’re churning in something ancient. Turning over that heavy stone. We’re still here, Dora.

The Louvre is all empire: stolen artifacts, stolen histories, genocides silenced in the walls of this glossed-cold, slick palace.

Well, I begin, I like the idea of a muse musing, being the object and the inspired at the same time. Your own living, the generative force. Like the muse isn’t this outside angel, brisk with inspiration, dipping in and out of your life. To wait for inspiration is to wait for death: like how this sarcophagus operates, exactly.

I think the act of living itself is more than enough to keep me making. I don’t wait for a tangential deity to strike me into meaning, into creating. My breath does that.

We exist, despite the inevitable doom, our someday death. People wander past and watch. They all have phones instead of faces.

The blue Craigslist links always seemed to suggest I keep pretending I’m a woman and fuck for money. I wasn’t brave enough for that. Instead, I’d look for nanny gigs or vaguely creative jobs before writing a bad poem or two and drinking through all we had.

Sometimes I’d meet up with Baby and whoever and talk to people and feel close to the night but never to myself. There were always so many things other people could talk about. I had a hard time looking up from the floor.

I’m not your blank canvas, you unoriginal fuck. Give me the plate, I say, taking a line.

What dreams do I live with ink on page /how do I know which words and when / how do I know I’m man / except that / I do, that / I am

Smart, I say, so what identity do I fuck into you? I wait. She takes a drag. The street is quiet. The gallery’s insides match my insides: warm in movement. You fuck me into a dyke. She laughs, kissing me. A distance settles. Baby, no, I’m not a lesbian. You know what I meant, she says.

Magnus Hirschfeld’s research, trans history set alight. The books are not even memory. No, they are evaporated ash fluttering in air. My scorched history, I breathe it in with decadence, with deference, with the weight of my identity held in dead lovers’ hands. We walk forward into night. Into my shapeless life of queer duck-and-cover.

I look for recognition, for the shapes I make myself into for her: woman, dyke, girl. I’m sorry, I say, cheeks wet with tears. For what? she asks.

I remember not remembering their names but nodding at a person in all red who assured me that color was a reason to be alive. I’m going to cry, I said. I did, smiling, she was so right. I decided I could be alive. I’ll wear red tomorrow—I hugged the person, feeling my heartbeat red into them. Sappy American, Baby scolded.

Baby’s sexual force was a cascade of trueness that humbled me. We respected the wild other lives we led beyond the enormous angles of care we cast for each other. Still, this hurt. We agreed early on that we wouldn’t carry on full romantic relationships outside each other. Sex was sex, though, and we knew it could happen. We promised to tell each other everything or include each other. The moment sex was secret, we had actually cheated. More and more, I knew the arrangement couldn’t hold for much longer. I

He and I were not equals. He was a middle-aged, tall cis guy with a massive cock. He was reckless and intense but successful and intelligent. Baby liked his photos. I knew enough from Baby and from doing the same drugs in the same rooms on the same nights that I would be ushered to join them soon enough.

I reminded myself not to compare our articulations of masculinity. I thought through the strict imperatives that belong to the fiction of gender. Cis men are not the only men, I reminded everyone and no one in my mind. The hot photographer’s version of masculinity is likely an unexamined, compulsory affect. I fight for mine.

I wished my wings could show her wings the wind that brought me here.

Despite her homoromantic clarity, I sought a protection from her. I wanted her to hold me. I wanted her to tell me that, of course, I am only becoming more myself, not someone else. I wanted to emerge from my confession with her by my side. You mean you don’t want to be with a trans man, I said.

We tried to smooth it out but my feelings of rejection, and hers of loss, were powerful. We tried to be kind to each other, trying to be the thing we needed most.

Our faces got really close as he whispered, You’re really such a gay boy, aren’t you? Thank you for noticing, I smirked, ecstatic.

I felt something lift then, some curated part of my personality fell away and words for myself didn’t matter anymore. There I was: a gay boy, felt and true in relational calm. A moment of rare stillness followed.

My love is true in its expansive ability to spread to others.

You’re such a pretty boy.

And ya know, you and Baby are, well, you’re gay. So is your boyfriend, I think to myself.

I don’t follow. I choose worship, although it’s not much of a choice at all. I sit at the dark church of the bar and drink for the both of us.

It’s the living openness of partying that hurts me. The self-calculated, arranged arrival and departure of my life. Is it durational if it never ends? Yes. I end. Cigarettes and I and lines and bottles and the trying flex of kiss all try to end me, I’m trying to end me. I’m passive, abject and living close to death, passing it off as fun.

I was trying to let myself feel denim and chest with nothing in between. I was trying to pretend I had a flat chest. My white T-shirt hung from my back pocket.

The balcony, too close to cement for my affectionate flop over, a delectation antithetical to living. My own means to end: to vindicate myself with gravity. Smack. I blink. Never alone, even in suicide. What is breath but a violent expenditure: I heard the froth of each exhale, the foam: salt-stale ocean of Étretat sloshed in my right inner ear. It made it inside after I touched all of me on the cliff. The mug of the cracked cold English Channel, uproarious and dramatic. Let’s swim now. I looked out, far, far departed from myself. I oozed slick on my hands.