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Anatomy, Mechanics

By Jack Kaulfus

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 I’m sitting in a circle of fifteen people who are transitioning into womanhood without the aid of naturally occurring puberty. Directly across from me is Diane, tall, slim, the tips of her hair just touching the tops of her shoulders. She smiles at me, crossing her long legs, and I have to look away because her eyes are painfully kind and her chin is strong. I think that if I could be a woman, I’d want to be her. But I’m not a woman. Even though I’m the only one here born into a female body, I want out.

 The rest of them are waiting for an introduction, because I’m still kind of new and refuse to wear a nametag. I see Diane nod knowingly as I give my birth name, which is undeniably feminine. It’s a name I didn’t have to work for.

 “Is this your preferred name?” The woman addressing me is the leader, Abby. She’s some kind of therapist. She asks me this every time, and I shake my head, no. But I don’t have an alternative, and she doesn’t press for one.

 After a circle check-in, Abby clears her throat and announces the topic of the day: Invisibility. Who has it, who wants it, where it comes from and where it went. Diane begins by saying that not being invisible gets easier.

 “Easy for you to say. You’re gorgeous.” This from Shannon, who has recently been through a divorce because her wife “could not deal with anybody else’s vagina.”

 Diane shakes her head, unfazed. “Maybe. But last night I managed to get thrown out of the bathroom at fucking Garden Ridge Pottery.”

 A discussion of bathroom tactics ensues, and a list of safe local establishments, equipped with either unisex toilets or understanding employees, is passed around the circle again. I’ve got three of these at home, but I take another anyway, fold it, and put it in my pocket. Everyone in the room is white except for one woman sitting bolt upright with a flowered bag in her lap. She’s newer than me, and her nametag says Alice. She raises her eyebrows and tells the group that in this town she’s never invisible, whether she’s passing as a woman or a man. Then she goes on to say that she feels like a coward - she hasn’t come out to her girlfriend but she’s been swiping the lipstick from their shared bathroom. 

 Abby nods encouragingly. She’s wearing a well-cut navy blue business suit, and her rings are large, yellow. I wonder, briefly, if these pieces are meant to distract from the hugeness of her knuckles. I envy these women, some of them still in full beards, some in sophisticated wigs, size 13 sandals. They are done with questions, on a certain path. And even though I am also carefully constructed, there’s no evidence of struggle in my physical appearance. My cheeks are smooth, my shoes and hair typical of a butch dyke. In public, I don’t register as anything crazily out of the ordinary. Nothing of the cusp I insist is the reason behind everything I do, think, say. My own fingers are completely bare. After the meeting, Diane and I walk outside to smoke.

 “It’s been months now. You need to find some boys,” she says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “You’re hiding.”

 “That’s not true,” I tell her, “it’s hard to come here every week.”

 “Save it for The Learning Channel. What is this?” She asks, sliding her fingers down my spine and over the ace bandage I use to bind my breasts flat. I shrug.

 “There’re better ways.” She removes a cell phone from her purse and scrolls through her contact list. “I’ve got an old college friend, back in town for a few days. He can help. You need some better clothes, a proper binder, that kind of thing. That ace’ll crack your ribs. Nobody wants that.”

 She grabs my hand and writes the number across my palm. I can smell the back of her neck as she does this, a brisk apple-y smell over iron. I recognize it—same as my menopausal mother’s—hormones not of her own making coursing beneath the skin, beading on the surface. Maybe she’s right. Maybe these women can’t help me any further. I blow the ink dry and light another cigarette.

***

 At home, my apartment is in shambles. I’ve dismantled every electrical appliance and piece of furniture that Claire left. My stereo still works, but only because music is an essential part of the wrecking process. I’ve put the individual pieces in labeled zip-locks - I’ll want to put everything back together, eventually. But just now, it’s comforting to see the coffee pot, the cordless phone and other familiar things broken down to elemental plastic and wire.

 I wish I had a predilection for violence, one that allowed for broken dishes and upended tables and the contents of kitchen drawers strewn across the floor. Instead, I can say that rage only brings unwanted contrition. Merely thinking about destroying my dirt devil requires me to go out and buy a new bag for it. But I am able to read an instruction booklet in reverse. And I’m expert with a screwdriver.

 I drop my keys on the counter and sit down at the kitchen table to work on the alarm clock I’ve been saving. It neglected to go off just often enough for Claire to accuse me of not knowing how to set it, so I feel a certain satisfaction when I accidentally snap the snooze button in half. I leave the snoozer where it lands and pick up a fork to pry off the rest of the buttons. I’ve been at it a few minutes when there’s a knock at my door.

 “Your doorbell doesn’t work,” says a wiry guy with earrings. He’s about my height, and built in the shoulders.

 I remove the doorbell cover to reveal the little box of wires I’ve dislocated. 

 He looks confused, but doesn’t comment. “Diane gave me your address. I was taking a walk.”

 I look at my palm. The name and number have smeared. “You’re Brit.”

 Inside, he sits down on the floor beside the gutted couch and accepts the can of soda that I offer.

 “My girlfriend left,” I say, as he examines a bag of small black screws.

 “Diane calls you Pete,” he says.

 “I know.”

 “Am I supposed to call you something different?”

 Diane had assigned me this name as a joke, a reference to my missing penis. But it was only because I refused to pick a name other than Jane, and she flatly refused to call me that. She tried to convince me that picking a new name is one of the perks of transitioning, but I just can’t do it. And Pete seems to be wrapping himself around my identity.

 “I don’t really want to have this conversation with a complete stranger,” I say.

 “It’s okay,” Brit says, pulling the bottom of his t-shirt to his chin, exposing two long horizontal scars just below pierced nipples. As if I don’t already know he’s transitioned. I look away, quickly, thinking of ways to make him leave. I want to get back to work on the alarm clock.

 “Nice guitar,” he says, lowering his shirt and picking his way across the floor to my music stand. I look at it, and can make out dust on the fret board. It’s slightly embarrassing. I haven’t had a gig in months. I haven’t practiced, either.

 “Look,” he says, running his finger along the E string, “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” He pronounces all the syllables in the word uncomfortable, making me wonder where he grew up, speaking like that. Then he straightens, and tells me he and Diane will pick me up for breakfast in the morning.

 “Breakfast?” I ask. Diane and I have been meeting Saturday mornings at Gibbous Moon early, before the rush. 

 “Yeah, she invited me along. That’s okay, right?”

 “Sure,” I say, going for casual. “See you.”

 About five o’clock in the morning, I start panicking about Brit showing up again at my house. He seems nice enough, but I don’t want him to show me the world of peeing dick devices and super safe chest binders and new soap opera names like Aiden, Caden, Jaden or Braden. What I want is to go to sleep one evening and wake up in the morning with a new body. And I want my girlfriend back.

 I’ve got Diane’s number, but I can’t call, because even though I’ve kept all the pieces to the phone, I can’t get it back together well enough to make it work. I decide I don’t have to answer the door when they come. I decide I don’t even have to be in the apartment when they come. By seven-thirty, I’m showered and on my way to breakfast at the IHOP Diane refuses to patronize.

 I slide into a blue vinyl booth and light a cigarette. The server is a tall skinny white guy with nice, even teeth. His name tag says “Puppy” and I’m not sure why, but it’s unsettling. He listens intently to my order, but doesn’t write anything down. I don’t ask for substitutions. 

 I’ve brought a book, and I’m enjoying the smoke and the smell of bacon frying on the grill in back when the entire booth rocks. Diane flips her hair behind her ears and smiles brilliantly.

 “You’re so obvious.”

 I tell her I’m hiding. “I’m not ready,” I say.

 Diane says, “I can change your mind.”

 Puppy brings my club sandwich and a glass of water for Diane. He blushes when she tells him that last year, she found a fingernail in her Eggs Benedict. “At that table right there.” She points to the historic booth. Puppy doesn’t know what to say, so he pulls a ketchup bottle from his apron, places it on the table, and disappears.

 “Brit has a famous brother,” Diane says.

 “Gay famous or famous famous?” I say, thinking she’s probably just lying.

 “Depressed hipster famous.”

 “Don’t care,” I tell her. ”I’ve read those stupid FtM transition boards and if Brit tries to adopt me I’m going to punch him. I’m nobody’s project.”

 “Well, you need to be somebody’s something.” 

 “Who’s the brother?” I ask.

 “Put down the sandwich,” she says.

 In the end, Brit’s famous brother wins. He might have been a harder sell were I not already infatuated with his music. Until this point, I’ve never been afforded the opportunity test my fear of transition against the pull of Ryan McFadden. Diane tells me not to mention the reason I’ve come. “Brit hates being ‘the brother,’ even though he loves Ryan. So keep it under your hat unless he mentions it.” She unfolds a ten dollar bill and lays it flat on the table. “Let’s blow this cesspool.”

 I only have a few minutes to feel bad about the real reason I’m joining Brit and Diane for breakfast. I wonder if this will be a funny story to tell later, when we become real friends. When we get to the Gibbous Moon, Brit is already seated and smiling at the server, who is crouched at the end of the table. Brit’s hair stands in shaky blue spikes from his head, and when I slide into the booth across from him, I’m embarrassed to feel so star struck. I want to avert my eyes, but force myself to look at him. When I do, it’s as though he’s been doing strange and precious things all night in his old blue work shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

 “Didn’t think you’d show,” Brit says.

 “Nice hair,” I say.

 “Diane did me,” he says. 

 “Pete was hiding,” Diane says, opening her menu. I don’t know why she’s pretending to read it. She orders the same thing every Saturday. The server brings a round of coffee, even though we haven’t ordered any.

 “I was not,” I say. 

 Brit turns to Diane. “I’m worried about Pete,” he says. “Have you seen the state of his apartment?”

 Diane nods. “He’s been at it for months. Since Claire left. You haven’t started buying things to destroy, have you?”

 “So where you from, Brit?” I ask.

 “Los Angeles,” Brit says. “But not originally. Originally from Asheville.” Diane’s foot nudges mine beneath the table, and I push back. It’s an ordinary question.

 “You don’t sound southern.”

 Brit tells a story about his roommate, who happens to be Tom Petty’s daughter. Apparently, there is enough room in her closet to park a Rolls Royce. “My room is off the deck,” he says, pulling a picture from his wallet. 

 “That’s my Mom,” he says. She is standing under a tree, and in front of the deck is one of those sparkling green pools built to look like a natural pond.

 “You live in the pool house?” I ask.

 Brit shrugs. “I work in a record store. Can’t afford Adria’s closet.”

 “Pete’s a musician,” Diane says. She’s trying to throw me off, but it doesn’t work.

 “A record store?” I ask. Diane’s college was one of those tiny, fancy liberal arts universities with no majors. “What?” I turn to Diane. ”You’re a fucking editor. How did Brit get stuck in retail?”

 Brit’s face clouds a little. “I like music.”

 “I didn’t mean it like that,” I say, but Diane kicks me hard.

 After breakfast, Diane goes to work and I offer to show Brit around town.

 “Nah,” he says, “let’s go to your place.” Inside, he goes straight to my fridge and pulls a bottle of white wine from the shelf in the door. ”Got a corkscrew?” He asks. When I hand him one, he asks if Claire left me because of my impending transition. I tell him that Claire was complicated. She was smart, but had grammar issues. She read a lot of Joseph Campbell, and would go around at night, after I’d gone to bed, and gather together my wallet and keys and phone so I wouldn’t have trouble finding them in the morning.

 It’d been all right at first. I introduced the concept of gender fluidity as a kind of intellectual exercise. She liked those, because she was good at logically deconstructing somebody else’s argument and forcing concession. She could be a vampire. When I started talking about my own congruence issues, she got ugly.

 “I don’t exactly like my body either, but this is what I was dealt,” she’d said.

 “By your maker?” I asked. She was a devout atheist.

 “You don’t got to believe in God to recognize that plastic surgery, for any reason, is dangerous. And self-indulgent.”

 “True love,” Brit says, pouring the wine into two large glasses. He examines the alarm clock on the table, the remains of which I have not yet bagged and labeled. “You gonna put all this shit back together?” He asks. When I don’t answer, Brit picks up a handful plastic pieces and walks to the middle of the apartment, where he drops everything on the floor. “I have an idea,” he says, looking around the room. He walks to the sliding glass balcony doors and picks up a freezer bag.

 “That’s part of my amp,” I tell him. Brit sets his wine glass down and opens the bag. He dumps the contents on top of the alarm clock. “Stop it,” I tell him, kneeling at the pile. I’m trying to sort the pieces, which are different colors, as the rest of my amp rains down on top of my hands. When I look up, Brit smiles. There’s another bag in his hand, and I grab for it. “I’m serious,” I say.

 “No shit,” he replies, swinging the bag away from my hand. I reach for his knee and catch the fabric of his jeans before he steps back. He loses his balance, but catches himself with his hands. “Help me,” I say. 

 Brit laughs, but his eyes are hard. He pushes the bag into my chest. “You help me,” he says. “Open the bag.”

 I look at the label. My mini-recorder. I used to carry it around in case I was lyrically inspired in the bank line or the grocery store aisle, but after I heard my voice on it, I never used it again. “I hate this recorder,” I tell him.

 “Dump the fucker.” He walks to the stereo and pushes play on the CD player and I say a quick prayer of thanks it’s not his brother’s voice sailing from the speakers.

 “I was a boy,” he tells me as he comes to the table to refill his glass, “long before I transitioned.”

 “It’s a living death,” I say as he tops off my wine glass on the table.

 “Don’t be dramatic,” he says. He grabs a hammer from my open toolbox, picks up the carcass of my old computer, and kneels at the pile of wire and plastic. 

 “Dump it,” he says, nodding at the mini-recorder in my hands.

 “I have downstairs neighbors.”

 “I have a hammer,” he says, bringing it down hard on the keyboard from my old Macintosh. Keys fly. “You wanna try?” He asks. I shake my head. The muscles in his arms are pre-pubescent—long and ropy and somehow new. His shoulders are just barely wider than his hips, and I think I can still see a trace of who he was before in the way he carries his head.

 I open the bag. I dump out the pieces. It doesn’t feel like anything. I don’t feel liberated like I think he wants me to. Then I stand and watch him. “How long have you known?” I ask. Brit doesn’t hear me. His left hand is high, holding the wine, and his right is smashing, smashing. He is beautiful. I tell him about the fight I had with Claire, the night before she left. He doesn’t quit hammering.

 Afterward, Brit insists we do something productive with the pieces. “My brother and I did this once,” he says. “But we were high. And the stuff wasn’t ours. This is better.”

 “Why do you work in a record store?” I ask.

 “Why are you still sitting on your ass? Dump some more bags and then find me some glue.”

 It’s in the toolbox. I hand it over and he liquid nails the top of my coffeepot to the door frame. “I was an art major,” he says. ”Diane’s got a painting of mine in her hallway.” I take the glue from him and adhere a small shard of the snooze button to the wooden frame beneath the lid.  

 Claire and I lived in the apartment for five years. It had been her place first, had seen another girlfriend come and go before I arrived. On the second floor of a three story complex, surrounded on all sides by other apartments and a wavy asphalt parking lot, the apartment had the cloistral feeling of a stalled elevator. We couldn’t paint the white walls or put holes in them. We had to hang everything with putty, which lent the place a perpetual teenage angstiness.

 Claire left six months into our fourth lease renewal. One long night we had a final fight about chest reconstruction, and she told me if she’d known I was traveling this path sooner, she’d never have got involved with me in the first place.

“How can you just decide you are no longer yourself? I mean, what if you discover you were ‘always’ a Vietnam vet? You gonna cut off your foot?” I stayed on the couch, and the next day when I got home from work her empty hangers were still humming on the metal bar in our closet. We haven’t spoken since.

 Claire mailed everything I had ever given her—from reminder notes I’d left on the kitchen counter to the pocket watch I’d presented to her on her 25^th birthday—back to me about a month after she’d left. I couldn’t touch the ring, but I took the watch apart.

 I empty a small tube of modeling glue into the lid of a jelly jar and swim the gears and springs in the sharp-smelling liquid. I toss the engraved backside into the trash. I don’t want to see it anymore. Then I remove the coated pieces and attach them, one by one, to the plastic microwave keypad, which Brit has glued to the inside of the empty fishtank. It looks terrible. The gears slide into each other. But the precision this task requires is satisfying. 

 I look over at Brit, who’s taken off his shirt and tucked it into the waist of his blue jeans. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because he can. He’s cutting something with my kitchen shears. When he turns around, he’s got a row of instruction pamphlet paper dolls. The scars on his chest are only a little lighter than the rest of his skin, and I can see fine blonde hairs curling over them. He strings the paper dolls, Japanese Character-side facing out, across the top of the entertainment center. 

 Brit and I go though a second bottle of wine, some leftover cooking sherry, and three tubes of liquid nails before we’re finished collaging the back wall. Brit sinks onto a couch cushion on the floor and cradles his head in his hands.

 “Bad sherry,” he says.

 “I should pay you,” I tell him, sitting down next to him. There are starry night whorls of screws running along the top of the picture window, a life size slatted horse tied to a cactus spined with broken rabbit ear antenna. Filling the empty hole where the television sat is half an ancient laptop - black heat coils from the toaster are plastered against the backdrop of white keyboard letters, forming a winter cityscape on the screen. We’ve left the Erasure poster intact, and one of the corners flutters as the air conditioner starts up. It’s dusk. The stereo has long been silent. “Does your brother live in L.A., too?” I ask. 

 Brit squints at me. “What did Diane tell you about me?”

 “You’re supposed to adopt me or something.”

 “My brother’s dead. He doesn’t live in L.A.” Brit drops his head back into his hands. “Let’s get out,” he says.

 Brit and I are about the same size, so I loan him a pair of jeans and a jacket. Diane meets us downtown. She’s been out on a dinner date with a man she now hates.

 “He’s in reality television,” is all she will say.

 Earle Thompson’s playing at the Oil Rig, and by the time we arrive, his first set of the night is already half over. Earle’s kind of a phenomenon around Texas - his first single hit number one on the western swing charts back in the mid fifties, and he was in the closet until a couple of years ago. Miraculously, a lot of his original fans still come to the shows—they form long lines at the doors of dying lesbian clubs or pool halls, ancient vinyl albums in hand. It’s not just the old-timers, though. There’s a whole legion of young gay folk quick to iconize an old guy with the guts to make a comeback in rhinestones. I love the aging sequins along Earle’s collar and yellowing mother of pearl in the frets of his guitar. I’m not much of a dancer. I like to sit close enough to watch him pick his guitar.

 The ceiling is low and the audience is sweaty. A young man in a tight faded snap-shirt and rectangular glasses steps in front of me, blocking my view, and offers his hand to a woman standing at the left side of the stage. She’s got to be sixty-five, in high heeled boots and day-glo lipstick, and they dance the next three songs before he spins her, breathless, back into her group of friends. She bumps into me on her way to the bar. She might already be a little drunk. She steadies herself on my shoulder, and then kisses my cheek. 

 “You boys are so sweet,” she says.

 Earle unstraps his guitar while his band, The Pecos Valley Boys, launch into Orange Blossom Special. He steps from the stage and ambles into the audience to enjoy the next couple of dance numbers with his pick of the cowboys.

 I leave Brit and Diane at the table and make my way through the crowd for a round of drinks. In front of me, a twink bellies up to the bar and whistles. His bracelets clink as he raises a whiskey shot high above his head. I watch him pivot gracefully, looking for someone to toast. He’s gorgeous, and I hate him the way I hate all beautiful men who can do this sort of thing - turn, blind, knowing some stranger from the crowd will be waiting there to connect. I order two beers, and think I catch sight of Claire’s profile at the other end of the bar. We used to come to Earle’s shows together, and it’s not exactly an accident that I’ve brought Brit here tonight. I don’t recognize her shirt.

 Claire’s talking to the barback, and I can almost hear her voice over the music. My heart is a hammer. I imagine her face is different, that the six months away from me have issued harder lines around her mouth, bags beneath her eyes. Behind us, the band has segued into San Antonio Rose, and the steel guitar is deafening. “Claire,” I say, but she doesn’t hear.

 Brit appears at my side. He pays the waiting bartender and grabs his beer. “We surrendered the table,” he says in my ear. “Old woman on the verge of collapse.”

 “That’s her,” I say to Brit, pointing at Claire across the bar.

 Brit looks at her. Then he looks at me and stands up straight. “We’re about the same height,” he says.

 “So?”

 “So what color are your eyes?” Brit grabs my chin and brings my face close to his own. “Close enough,” he says. “Give me your glasses.” He takes a swig of his beer, hands it to me, and heads straight for Claire.

 Through the bobbing heads, I watch him tap her on the shoulder. She turns, and when I squint, I think I can see that her face is no different. At least not the way I’d imagined. She looks confused, then says something and pushes Brit back a little so she can get by. Brit steps aside, but bends and says something in her ear as she passes. Claire is small, but she’s solid, and when she turns around again, she throws all her weight behind a single punch. As Brit goes down, Claire backs up and is folded into a group of people I recognize as friends from her work. It’s simple, not at all like the brawls on television. The music doesn’t stop, and by the time the bouncer gets to the scene, Claire and her friends are gone.

 I circle around the back of the bar and find that Brit’s been helped to his feet by a busty girl who’s claiming she’s not drunk and should probably drive him home. The bouncer tells Brit he needs to leave. Scared we’ll lose Diane, I take a quick detour into the bathroom and find her talking to a handsome dyke about reality television. I tell her we have to go.

 “What the fuck was that?” I ask outside. Brit’s lip is bleeding. The handsome dyke has followed us outside and is standing close to Diane, listening to our conversation.

 “She didn’t recognize you,” Brit says. “I thought she’d be surprised, but I didn’t think she’d hit you.”

 “She didn’t hit me,” I say.

 Brit nods. “Told her I was you. Started testosterone.”

 “No way she believed you.”

 ”Me, or you?” He hands my glasses back. They’re broken. “Sorry, man,” he says.

 Neither Brit nor I can drive now, so Diane hands her card to the concerned dyke, gives her a peck on the cheek, and leads Brit and I toward her car. While Diane tends to Brit’s lip at the kitchen sink, I walk down the hallway to look at his painting. I know which one it is—a nude on a rooftop, stepping off the edge into nothingness. The edges are a little blurry, so I close one eye and look through an unbroken lens of my glasses to see whether the blur is part the art or part of my perception. The signed name is Britney Sellers.

 “This is good,” I say, loud enough for Brit to hear. 

 Holding ice to his purpling chin, he drops heavily onto the couch and sighs. “It’s complete shit,” he says.

 Diane agrees, removing her pumps and sitting beside him. “You don’t know anything about art.”

 “I know about music, though,” I tell her. She shoots me a warning look, so I decide to press on. There’s nothing much to lose. Diane lied me into a vanity corner, and as a result, Claire’s gone, now, for good. “Especially Ryan McFadden.”

 Brit nods, confusedly and readjusts the ice against his skin. 

 “It’s been a long day, fellas,” Diane says, watching my face.

 Brit looks from Diane to me. “What am I missing?”

 “Nothing,” I say. He’s okay. A nice enough guy. But while he’s given me some distracting things to look at on the wall, he’s also guaranteed that Claire will never see them.

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