Trans/plant/portation

I’m sure we’ve all heard the narrative a hundred times over: I’ve been a writer since I first held writing implement to fingers. And my Mom loves my stories, and all my friends say my book is a bestseller. And then we’re supposed to laugh condescendingly, because this little intrepid person is so clueless, clearly, about the publishing industry. Oh, if they knew about the publishing industry, we think smugly to ourselves, they’d know that Mom’s opinion doesn’t matter, and all their friends are wrong.

Just to give this some dimension, the US published 172,000 books in 2005, according to the geeks who count such things. Of these, let’s be generous and say that 200 of them counted as “best seller” status. (Anyone remember French Women Don’t Get Fat?) That’s one tenth of one percent of everything published that year. Of course, most of these books don’t even dream of topping any list: Unsolved Problems of Noise and Fluctuations, a fantastic tome on physics, probably didn’t make it to people’s holiday wish lists. But even taking just the fiction, memoir, poetry, and narrative nonfiction into account, the likelihood is very, very low, trust me.

This isn’t to say people shouldn’t write down their stories, or whatever things they have cavorting around in their heads. It just means that most stuff goes nowhere, but on a page, in a notebook, or onto the hard drive of a computer. And that’s really okay, because the vast majority of our human endeavor to create the amazing is actually quite awful. Total drivel. Buzzard crap, or that Canada geese shit that turns everything green and stinks of high heaven—hey, it was a life experience I won’t ever forget.

So why write, even? If it all sucks, why bother?

My answer is my answer alone. I write because it gets better when I rewrite it. The third time around, it starts to sound nuanced. The fourth revision I’m making specific language choices, listening to the rhythm of the words, the believability of the dialogue. The fifth time through I may do something drastic, like change the tense, cut the first 7 pages and have the narrative begin at a new point. Actually, I usually chop out my beginnings, trusting that the quotation I heard a long time ago is true: One should start a story like one would pick up a puppy, a little behind the front. I have no idea anymore who said it, maybe St. Vincent Millay or Doris Lessing or Eudora Welty. Now that woman wrote a lot.

By the time I get around to the tenth revision, I’m just nitpicking words and it’s more like talking about nothing at the end of a coffee date than actual editing. I just need to declare it’s over, we’ll meet again someday. At this point I’ve cleaned it up, swept out excessive prepositional phrases, changed sentence structure, evaluated my tone, simplified, simplified, simplified, and attempted to really cast a light on my characters without overwriting them. I like it when readers pick up different aspects of my protagonists, when they almost like the foils to those protagonists, but for the fact that they’re really despicable.

If enough time goes by, my relation to my stories changes. I used to think of this as watching the story fall behind me as I charged ahead, a steam engine train of a person. I now see that we’re both moving, in some kind of random, and certainly unpredictable direction from each other. Sometimes we swing back around, like a comet passing through a solar system every 76.2 years, and old ideas make a new kind of sense to us. But sometimes we never occupy the same space again. Maybe that was the story best understood by my 17-year-old self, and my 39-year-old brain simply doesn’t want to hang onto it anymore. Or maybe I’ll enjoy seeing where I once was in capability, craft, and idea, even as I acknowledge that I’m in a new place.

In any case, I’m glad I’ve written down as much as I have. And while I would be thrilled, say, with an appearance on Ellen, I’m not presuming anything I write would be a bestseller. It’s true that after years of messing around with fiction, with literary analysis, and the reading of thousands of books, I really needed to write a memoir about my transition.

I really haven’t talked about why with anyone except my writing coach, Lea, who has more than one hand on the pulse of the universe and who I see as a really friendly, astute guide through this whole publishing rigamarole. First, I had some demons to exorcise, and writing was the best way to do that. A lot of that writing was just for me, not for any book, and most certainly not for anyone else’s retinas. But it did let some of the experience percolate and then steep, and gave me a blueprint for organizing the past 6 years into a sturdy narrative. There was some motivation stemming from my “mentoring” of a young female-to-male transsexual who was asking many of the same questions I’d pondered at the start of my experience. I’ve spent copious hours online, asking and later, answering the strangely narrow-banded litany of inquiries people have about transitioning: will my family hate me forever? Will my partner desert me? Am I just disfiguring myself? These are really all smaller branch questions that have popped out from one solid root question:

Am I crazy?

The answer none of us wants to admit is, maybe. Maybe we/you/they are crazy. But we’re probably not crazy, because crazy people don’t formulate questions on the Internet, research their options in a rational way, get opinions, sift through information, try different methods of managing what turns out to be an illness—crazy people behave less from a place of information gathering, and more from a place of irrational. Crazy people respond differently to the therapies around gender identity dysphoria. Transsexual people see their happiness and sense of well being increase dramatically after even the most mundane or simple changes to their sex and gender identity.

Could a memoir bring these points across? I thought so. Could I tell a story in which a fairly ordinary person realizes something extraordinary? And has the daring to see it through? Could I make getting a sex change seem like the right notion for a protagonist? I thought about it and decided yes. I don’t think I’m the trans Messiah; this isn’t an especially rare narrative, even as it’s certainly a twist on the boy meets girl tale.

And heck, in this memoir, there is boy-meets-girl, if readers are okay with boy-who-used-to-be-girl-meets-girl-who-usually-likes-other-girls.

Perhaps agents think the concept is too out there, and that’s why I’ve had trouble selling this. But I believe in this story and this project. I know that there are thousands of people who would guffaw at the hilarity I’ve lived through, and fret through the hard parts, and have questions like I’ve had, about medical services and people’s judgment and how strange it is to see the world through completely new lenses. I have faith in this book, and I just have to keep pitching it, even as I work on other stories that want their 15 minutes of fame on my keyboard.

I used to spend a lot of time getting stuck as a writer, but then I pushed through on the memoir project and now everything I bottled up wants to come out to play. And that’s how I know the memoir is a story that needs telling. And though we may cross each other in space at some point, hurtling in new directions, it will retain at least a core of interest for me, and hopefully for some agent and publisher out there.

And hey, my sister thinks it’s great.

With my mother visiting for a week, I came up with an ambitious list of things to do in and around Walla Walla. The Colville Street Patisserie. Klicker’s farmer’s market and antiques. Petit Noir chocolatiers down in Milton-Freewater. Main Street and downtown. The Kirkman House, Pendleton Mills factory, Ice Burg drive-in, and the college campus. I added items on the vacation to do list never thinking about my mother’s energy levels or capacity for long car rides. Seems my tolerance for getting from Point A to Point B has expanded since we moved here, like Mercury comparing itself to the gas giant Jupiter.

Reality, at some point, was bound to take over. It had watched me with my black felt pen and growing list and chuckled quietly to itself, knowing it wouldn’t have to do much to stymie my plans.

We did make it to most things in and around town, except the museum. Something about a historic house with a suffrage exhibit just wasn’t grabbing my mother, who obviously takes voting for granted. She did get some sorbet at the Patisserie, and a chance to look around.

“So this is where you write,” she asked. I nodded.

“Hmm,” was her response. It’s a little difficult to ascertain what was layered into such a mouthful, but I think she approved. I know already she thinks I’m a little weird, so that’s not a big deal anymore.

We looked at items in a home furnishings store on Main Street. She told the owner everything was overpriced. I covered my face with my right hand, a 3-year-old’s response of “if I can’t see you, you can’t see me.” I explained to her that most of the shops on Main Street aren’t for Walla Wallans, they’re for the wine tourists from Seattle, the executives who like to show off to their friends about things they’ve purchased. It doesn’t make any sense to this grown-up farm girl. It just sounds like tinny silliness.

Traveling down to Milton-Freewater in Oregon, I show her the obsession they have with frogs. I can’t tell her how it started because I don’t know, and everyone I’ve asked seems not to know the origin, either. But literally every 50 yards there is another frog statue or mural.

“There’s a whole group of people out there who love frogs,” she says, and in my brain I morph it into one of those annoying Facebook statuses: There are two types of people in the world, it begins. People who love frogs, and people who don’t give a shit.

I am in the latter. Nonetheless, the frog statuary are kind of cute.

She takes a while chatting with the chocolatiers in Petit Noir, while I smile and pretend not to worry that we’re there too long. Mom thinks it’s all just nice conversation, and maybe it is, but I’m wondering if as customers, we are using our bizarre power over them to hold them hostage, all for the promise of buying $30 worth of prettily packaged product. I’ve certainly paid people to talk to me before, but there was usually some therapy or counseling going on in the exchange. And I mean that literally, not as some euphemism for “I pay prostitutes for my mental health,” so don’t go there. Mom’s back starts to ache so we head back to the car and head back to Walla Walla, leaving Pendleton unexplored.

“Is Pendleton open on Monday,” she asks.

“Pendleton’s a town, Mom.”

“I mean the mill.”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“I know Pendleton’s a town, silly.” She laughs, in the same way I’ve taken to laughing.

We go tooling around the next day, east of town, over to Klicker’s, the strawberry pickers. I just made that up. I should sell that phrase to them for a couple of berry buckets. They’ve probably already thought of it. Mom likes the antique store, even though it’s littered with faketiques—things are made to look old, but were mass produced a few years ago. She can spot the real things easily. I pick up the handle on an old phone, the kind with a tube for a mouthpiece and two brass bells at the top like eyes, and marvel at how heavy the ear piece is.

“We had one of these on the farm,” she says, referring to Section 28, where she grew up in Saskatchewan. So the weight doesn’t surprise her. She hands it back to me and I hang it back on the hook. Immediately she flips it over. “It goes that way,” she tells me, smiling at my ignorance.

At the end of a winding road into the Blue Mountains we see sheep, and she gasps. She didn’t have any excitement for the horses or cattle or goats we’ve seen, but the sheep get her to draw a sharp intake of breath. A dog comes out onto the road, barking at us for coming too close to his house. Thirty yards away the county road stops and their private road takes over.

“My back hurts,” she says.

I say I’m sorry, I thought these bucket seats were pretty comfortable.

“It’s not the seat, it’s my back.”

I laugh, and Mom asks what I think is so funny.

“It’s not the hot coals, it’s my feet,” I say. Now she’s laughing.

“It’s not the machete, it’s my bleeding cut.” We laugh harder.

We can coast at 50 m.p.h. on the downward slope out of the mountains. We’re still laughing.

“I can try to tell Gary about this,” she says, referring to her husband, “but I think you had to be there.”

This is an excerpt from the memoir I’m shopping around. I’m not going to provide any context because there’s no point in extra yammering.

Bumbling into Body Hair: Tales of a Klutz’s Sex Change

Lying on the couch after my surgery, time stopped having meaning. I went off the Gregorian calendar and started one of my own. On Day 12 of the Drains from Breasts of Yore they started accumulating a cloudy brown fluid. However one defined “good,” this wasn’t it. I called the doctor’s office twice in two days, but both times they said to be patient, slow down, stop being so active, wait until they’re putting out less fluid. Two nights later I checked the right drain. I had obviously transitioned to Kermit the Frog, looking at the green fluid in the floppy drain cup. The tube itself was clear yellowish. After thinking about how few things in the human body made it to that part of the color spectrum, I called the doctor’s answering service, saying simply who I was, my phone number, and what was happening. Nobody called me back.

When I’d called on Friday, otherwise known as the Day Before My Bodily Fluid Celebrated St. Patty’s Day, I told them that my partner was heading out of town this weekend and if I’d need a person with me to get the drains out, could we please do it now? She said not until the drains were producing less on both sides.

“Now, you’re in Philadelphia, right?” Good Lord, she’s not pulling a chart, is she?

“No, I’m in DC,” I corrected.

“Well, still, they need to be making less fluid.”

The following Monday, now called the Day of the New Week of Oblivion, Nurse Barbara called me to say, “Your drains have been in a long time. Come in today so we can take them out.” I asked, gently, again, if I need someone to come with me. “That would be advisable, yes.”

Somehow my direct payment of $7,000 didn’t preclude me getting a different answer depending on whom I talked to. No, you can’t come in on Friday and it will be fine if you come alone, and no, you should have come in before and you really should have someone with you. How about I split the difference, I wondered. I’ll agree that I should have been allowed to come in before, and I’ll come by my own self.

I hoped I’d be much happier once the drains were out, if only because cleaning myself wouldn’t continue to consist of a series of soapy and wet washcloths while standing over a sink.

*   *   *

The fluid saga had not ended. I was getting dressed for work, which, 3 weeks post-op, included stuffing my surgical vest with maxi pads, to increase the compression on the hurt parts and help speed healing. Maxi pads, to their credit, have a nebulous outer layer kind of like a black hole that sucks in material at terminal velocity, crushing it into an infinitely small, infinitely dense piece of matter. When connected to wormholes, by the way, they deposit all of this material into a new location. Thus it was possible, I theorized, that our universe had been formed by the big bang of millions of crushed maxi pad deposits.

So I was getting dressed, and I snagged a suture on the left side of my chest in the maxi pad. It hurt beyond description, which I articulated by screaming. Being a maxi pad, I couldn’t get the suture out of it, so I tiptoed to the bathroom, holding up the vest/maxi pad combo, for of course I stuck the adhesive of the pad to the vest. I tried not to jiggle the suture and was fortunate that brand new man boobs weren’t prone to such things as actual jiggling. I cut the suture, still feeling pained, covered the cut end with some paper tape, and proceeded to finish getting dressed. I got in my car, thrilled, somehow, to be commuting again.

Four hours into my workday, I was beyond uncomfortable. It felt like I’d pulled a muscle, or cracked my sternum, or something else awful: a searing, stabbing pain that took the place of whatever else had previously occupied my thoughts. I muddled through the rest of my day—my supervisor had been keeping my workload low, out of sympathy or a seething need to get me off every project—and left a little early. The second I got home I ripped off all my shirts in a “get the leeches off of me,” way, not an exotic dancer way. Nothing looked wrong. The tape was still there. The incisions were clearly healing. But it felt like something was pulling the sutures out. It was a little like when I’d had shingles, years earlier. I took a few ibuprofen and tried to feel better, but the pain just got worse. I called the surgeon, who said that pulling a suture may have damaged some of the scar tissue, and that it was a painful thing to have happen, but should be better in 24 to 48 hours. She thought ibuprofen was a good idea, too, since it’s also an anti-inflammatory. I didn’t sleep well, but I made it to 5:30 a.m. And I woke with a new friend: the return of Bertha, my old right breast! It was the morning of Breast Resurrection Day.

Bertha appeared to be very irate at my choice to excoriate her. She was red, hot to the touch, and something like a B-cup. As the day went on Bertha decided to install an addition under my right armpit. I called the surgeon’s office again, and one of the nurses said, “oh, you can’t have an infection this late. Just rest up and don’t be so active.” Always with the “not so active.” What were they, paid by the junk food lobby? And what was that about a 2-week recovery period again?

In two more days, otherwise known as the Day of the Breastal Revolt, Bertha had turned hard to the touch. She felt like the pectoral muscle of the statue of David. Only this was not what I’d had in mind for rock-hard musculature. I called the doctor’s office again. I got the nurse to agree to call in another antibiotic prescription for me, and she sighed while I said I had to look up the pharmacy number of the CVS near me. She reminded me that it’s “very, very rare to have an infection this far out.” More likely was an allergic reaction to the sutures. But who could know without looking at me?

I posted my symptoms online and asked if anyone knew what I was experiencing. I did research on mastectomy outcomes and incidences. I told my friends I didn’t feel well, and I started to feel crazy for having such a hard time. Not to mention guilty for not going to work.

Susanne flew back in Friday from her interview in California after getting bumped off of her original, earlier flight. I felt like death in a frying pan. That night I woke up several times with the chills. I was sick of something being wrong. I sat around a lot all weekend, although I did go to a “Friend’s Thanksgiving” dinner, assuming I could deal with sitting up for a few hours. When two of the dining attendees broke out guitars and amps and started messing around like stinky 13-year-old boys, I turned in for the evening, Susanne nipping on my heels. I noted quietly to myself that if I were ever in a band, I would only do my music with friends who also liked to do that with me, or ask them in advance if they’ve brought their ear plugs.

Regular names of the week came back to me as I renewed my full work schedule. Monday and Tuesday I’d been signed up at work to go to an annual recap of the literature in my field, so I figured if I could sit at home, I could do it in an office building, too. I went home early the first day and kept cursing myself for not feeling well. I couldn’t make it past six hours of sitting. Why am I such a baby?

Wednesday morning I had my quarterly visit with my endocrinologist, who was also an internist. Susanne and I were happy that some medical professional was going to actually see my face. Ace looked at me with my shirt off.

“Holy shit, Everett!” This, the man with no sense of humor or intense expression. He ordered me to call the surgeon, and I told him I couldn’t seem to get past the nursing staff. I’d only managed to get to the doctor once on the phone.

“Look,” he said, actually expecting I would then look directly at him, “she took you to the dance, she can take you home. No other doctor is going to go near this.”

“Hey, you watch how you talk about Bertha there.” He grinned.

“Just go up there and insist that she see you.”

Oh my God. It must really be bad.

I left his office and called the surgeon’s office once more, getting one of the nursing staff.

“I’ve got a 100-degree fever now,” I said.

“Well, a 100-degree fever isn’t that high a fever,” she replied.

What, I was going to need to cough up a kidney before they said yes to me?  Was there a magic word I was missing here? Open sesame!

“My internist told me I had to come see you.”

She suddenly got interested. “Oh, is that an option? Where do you live? Are you local?” Had I not told them I lived in DC in each and every conversation?

Of course, I thought, people fly in for this from everywhere. They probably don’t do a lot of follow up on FTMs.

She told me to come in the next two hours. She didn’t realize I was still in my car, illegally on my cell phone. I saw that snow was starting to fall. I had to get out of the city, fast, before people started walking around with A-frame boards pronouncing that the end of days were nigh. The first winter snow in DC always brought out the hysterics.

I spent the next 90 minutes driving in the left lane behind nervous drivers going 30 miles an hour. My chest throbbed, my pulse, which was already too high, was pounding, I still felt terrible, and I walked into the surgeon’s office. They took me to an exam room and I undressed and showed the nurse my chest.

“Those are stretch marks,” she said, looking at the red lines streaming across my torso from the incision line.

“I don’t have stretch marks,” I muttered. Wow, I feel like crap.

“Sure you have lots of stretch marks,” she said, arguing with me, apparently concerned for my general health, if not the acute problem that had gone unchecked for more than a week.

“I don’t have stretch marks in the middle of my chest!”

Yelling did the trick, and Nurse Barbara left the room, dismissing me with her departure. Another more daring nurse came in and saw me.

“You have cellulitis.”

“Itis,” I knew, was a suffix that means, to us laypeople, infection. Cellulitis is an infection under the innermost layer of skin, and it is bad news, because it quickly becomes septic, meaning that it can travel to one’s bloodstream, and then one is in for a bad ride. It was like Dr. G, Medical Examiner bad. The surgeon came in, scrubs on from just finishing up someone else’s top surgery. Her smile disappeared as she took one look at me, and she immediately started ordering all kinds of supplies to the room, things with names I didn’t understand. They took off my opened-up shirts, and the doctor gave me a local and then opened up a few of my stitches. This is when I peed out of my rib cage—at least it felt like peeing, as I had a sense of relief, and warm liquid streaming over my skin. Well, I don’t exactly pee down my legs, but it was the closest life experience my brain could register, and it’s what occurred to me as I was being aspirated. I felt a big dose of happy as the disgusting ooze left my body. And it was a strange experience to watch my chest deflate. I could almost hear Bertha screaming like the Wicked Witch of the West, “Nooooooo, water, nooooooo, I’m mellllllllllllting!”

The surgeon looked at me kindly as I side-urinated. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ev, you’re the one percent outcome.”

“I’ll go buy a lottery ticket,” I said.

They gave me an IV bag to re-hydrate me—for all my liquids had been going to Bertha the Undead—and a strong antibiotic. They put in a new drain on that side, a floppy plastic tube with no collection cup. I stayed in the dark room for a couple of hours, drifting in and out of sleep until the bag was empty. I returned two days later to get my side rechecked. It looked much better, even though I had some more recovery to do now. I saw the surgeon again a few days later, now clearly on her radar screen. She’d even given me her home number so I could call her directly. And I had finally earned my VIP pass with the nurses.

Ever since I read in Stuff White People Like that Moleskines are a staple of white pretentiousness and posturing, I’ve been self-conscious about mine. Christian Lander had me nailed, right down to the MacBook Pro sitting next to it as I sipped at a non-fat latte in an overpriced coffee house. At least I hadn’t procured mine with a credit card—I’d scraped together cash from around the house, on the premise that if I only used loose change, it was like a free purchase, like how sucking on a mint after an outing to Sonic is free of calories. How idiotically white of me.

To make matters worse, this is not my first Moleskine. It is, in fact, my second. And if anyone cared to study this little black ruled book, they would discover a “2” written  in on the bottom, where the gold leaf should be, I guess.

Perhaps it’s better that I used up a whole book already, because at least I write in them, and no, they’re not just full of grocery lists and directions to IKEA.

I also don’t have anything in here worthy of da Vinci or Hemingway, two of the Moleskine’s more famous users, and Hemingway was a stuck up misogynist anyway. His best short story is six words long (his assertion, not mine).

No, I write in this notebook to keep track of query letter submissions, the inevitable rejections, submissions to journals, and the places I might submit to someday but for what I consider exorbitant submission fees (read, $10). I also keep track of my work in progress’ progress, scheduling deadlines for myself like an agent or editor would. That way I can have arguments with myself over why I’m giving excuses on missing important dates and don’t I know what this is doing to my career, and who is going to want to work with me after this?

I’m sure I still have my mind. It’s right in a box over there.

All of this ponderance about Moleskine notebooks comes because I’m sitting at PDX airport waiting to meet my mother who will be visiting us or a week. A technology professional is at the table next to mine, speaking loudly into his cell phone describing the apparently delicious and speciously nutritious drink he’s just purchased from Jamba Juice: a little bit of banana, strawberry, and mango, he declares loudly to his wife, plus some SOY PROTEIN! and ESSENCE OF WHEATGRASS! It sounds particularly disgusting to me, but then I’m the schmuck with a $4 nonfat mocha in a world-preserving, 100% recycled cup, so what do I know? And writing in a Moleskine. Damn Moleskine.

I don’t feel particularly pretentious, but then again, white people never do. We’re pretty much blind to it, save the very extreme examples—here I’m thinking of German avant garde artists from the 1980s, or say, people from Massachusetts named Biff Wellesley or Chauncy Milton who wear plaid shorts unironically and race in regattas around the Cape. Maybe I feel a bit incognito partly because I am sans my titanium Apple accessory this evening, and partly because I am in green cargo pants and a black hoodie. I fit right in to PDX, the city, not the airport. Come to think of it, who nicknames their city after their airport? I bet if I asked everyone in earshot who had a Moleskine to whip it out and wave it like they just don’t care, 39 percent of the folks here would be showing off their pretentiousness inside of 16 seconds.

The airport announcer is saying, for the fourth time, that Jesse Bauer really needs to meet his party at the Panda Express. Jesus, Jesse, get moving, their dinners are going to get cold.

I left Walla2 right after receiving notice from an agent in Seattle that they just didn’t quite connect to my manuscript, so they won’t be moving forward with me on this project. Moving forward. I note that they didn’t rule out moving left, or upward. Perhaps those options are still open.

My mind reads this rejection sentence and immediately thinks of a shoreline. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it goes back to that oft-repeated line about the footprints of Jesus as he carries his ignorant follower who somehow doesn’t get that hello, JESUS IS CARRYING YOUR DUMB ASS. I’m not sure with whom I’ll be moving forward, but if Jesus is doing any agenting, I’m open to the idea. I bet he could work wonders with publishers, yuk yuk.

She went on to say in her letter that it wasn’t me, it was her, and just, perhaps, a matter of taste. This Dear John letter tone didn’t sit well with me. A matter of taste? She was looking for a Prada clutch, and I was a Jacqueline Smith pocketbook on the clearance rack at KMart? Or perhaps it just wasn’t what she was looking for right now. Maybe three years from now humorous memoirs about klutzes who get sex changes will be all the rage. But why say perhaps? Doesn’t she know? It’s her opinion she’s offering.

Well, it comes down to platform, I get that. Mr. Dan Savage of the Stranger, another GLBT author working with a Seattle agent, has readership. So okay, I’ll work on having a platform and see if my words suddenly sound better, or become more connectable to people.

The second paragraph of her letter was just as brief. She wanted to encourage me to continue trying. I genuinely appreciate that. But why? Or more to the point, how? She said there was much to recommend about my writing. What, specifically? The font? The careful avoidance of split infinitives? The witty banter among urban dwelling queers? What? I’m left, as after my other rejections, in the middle of a guessing game. So far, my guesses have been wrong, if success is measured in contract proposals.

But I’ll tally ho and try again, because I am a writer with nothing to lose. JK Rowling got 13 rejections of her original Harry Potter book. I have just surpassed her with this 14th rejection.

Take that, JK!

Back in DC, I bowled regularly, a.k.a. was in a bowling league. But not just any league, I was in a GAY bowling league. My colleagues had fashioned snarky team names like Men with Balls and Always in the Gutter. My team was called the Evil Bitches. This was much closer to how we wanted to see ourselves than our actual collective temperament, and there was more than one occasion when the opposing team members would shake our hands at the end of a night, only to say, “you know, you aren’t really that bitchy.” We considered changing our attitude to suit the title, but were too lazy to make it happen.

Blowing my knee out at my wedding, it was a while before I could execute my proper bowling approach and land my weight on my left leg. Seven months from my surgery, to be specific, and I felt a little unsure at first. But now the knee is comfortable. Good thing, since I joined a league again. A GAY league. Now now, there is no gay league in Walla Walla, but there is one in the Tri-Cities. This means that out of a population of 170,000 people (according to 2008 Census estimates), there are 40 gay bowlers, or GLBT bowlers, to be exact.

There are still the tongue in cheek team monikers—I’ll note here that a women’s team stole the “with Balls” phrasing in this league, Dolls with Balls—but at this point the similarities with DC’s teams cease. They are much more laid back players, classic Northwest, if you will allow me the indulgent reference. Gutter ball? No big deal! Missed the head pin? Just try again!

Trust me, I never, never saw this during my three or four years of league play in Virginia. I think people would have ejected their hearts right out of their chests if they’d had to actually say cheerleady things after bad throws.

Not that we weren’t nice out east. We just really wanted to do well, and reward greatness. We gritted our teeth after an errant ball and grunted, “next frame,” or the more desperate, “next game.” Sometimes these were followed with a half-sincere “it’s okay.” More common was the line of strikes and spares down one team’s frame, followed by cheering and high fives. There is so much high fiving in bowling that it is practically a sport within a sport.

The high fives are often done by teams who are very peppy, the kind of team that one hates to play because they’re just so in your face about their excitement, when all one wants to do is just figure out the oil pattern and throw a good rock or thirty. There’s the team that went to great expense to procure matching bowling shirts that look fantastic until you see the simply awful-looking attempt at a logo on the back. People, sometimes less is more, or at least, more easy on the eyes.

The funniest opponents are the teams who are either mad at each other that night, or who are so frustrated with their bowling that they begin taking it out on each other during the night. I can really mess with their already wobbly psyches, like telling them, almost condescendingly, that maybe this next ball will be The One, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. (Seriously? All hope for humankind rests on Ted Logan’s shoulders? I’ll never get over this.)

Such attempts at sinking a foundering ship don’t work in the Tri-Cities league, which is so close to the Hanford nuclear Superfund cleanup site that everything in that area begins with the prefix of “Atomic.” Atomic Muffler, Atomic Storage, and Atomic Bowl. The best part about this atomic neighborhood, in my opinion, are the little hydrogen atom graphics that accompany these buisneses, friendly little electrons that practically have a smiley face, as if the last thing they would ever dream of doing is harming anyone. Hanford, of course, is the place that created the nuclear material that the US dropped on Nagasaki. I don’t suppose those hydrogen atoms had smiley faces that day.

The folks in the Tri-Cities league are well aware of this history, and yet, they all carry on in what is basically a factory town’s final resolution, courtesy of the Department of Energy. Bowling is a release for them from their work days, to be savored and enjoyed, even if it is only a few pins knocked down at a time. For me, traveling the 50-some-odd miles from Walla Walla every week, it’s a way to be around geeky and fun gay people again, and to help string together things I’ve enjoyed before with my life out here.

It is a 50-mile drive, however, and it takes me right past the awful Boise Cascade paper mill. Last night I was relieved of the putrid odor by, of all things, a skunk. It’s saying something when dead skunk smells better than the process of turning trees into cardboard. How nice of Mr. Skunk to take one for the team.

I am a very good cook, if I do say so myself. I don’t brag often, or at least, I’ve been told not to brag, so in my attempts not to be a condescending ass, I button my lips rather than assert things I think I’ve gotten good at over the years. Perhaps it’s out of fear that someone much more gifted will be sent to my side the very moment I start posturing, and suddenly, I’ll be next to James Beard who will smile authentically, and I’ll just look like a total dipshit. And anyway, my list of things on which I have any hope of bragging is rather short.

But, at risk of sounding stuck on myself, I’ll go ahead and say I’m a good cook, and I’ve picked up a sense of tastes that go together, how to build a complex and enjoyable flavor profile, good ideas on textures and color and pacing people through several courses. I don’t have perfect skills—looking at a pile of minced onions, there is too much variation among the pieces for me to pretend at a French Culinary Institute degree. But I know the difference between minced, chopped, julienned, or rustic cut. I can make a mother sauce in the French tradition of Bechamel or Veloute, though I have no master’s sauce to compare mine, so it’s possible my vinagrette tastes like horse ass. I do presume someone would have mentioned this by now, however.

All this said, I don’t always use a recipe when I’m making something. In fact, I rarely use instructions unless it’s a cuisine I don’t know. So when Susanne, sick on the couch with a croaky voice asked for some chicken noodle soup, I said sure and headed to the basement to get some organic stock. This was only because I thought I’d used all of my homemade chicken and duck stock for a beef noodle soup I’d made earlier in the week, also to help soothe her cold. And there is nothing that doesn’t feel a little more luxurious when duck stock is added to it. Nothing culinary, that is. I don’t advise adding duck stock to say, one’s Mark Twain first edition book collection.

(Note to college students everywhere: if you are hacking up your gallbladder all over passersby on your way to class, just turn around and go back to bed. Your professors don’t like it when you make them sick or give them laryngitis.)

I chopped up some chicken tenderloin and threw it in my pot with some heated olive oil, letting it brown and crisp up a little, then deglazed the pot with one box—the last box—of stock, making a mental note to get some more from Costco next week, because well, we buy our cooking supplies in bulk. This meant I’d made about 4.5 cups of soup.

A while later I added some egg noodles and once they’d plumped up, saw that the stock had cooked down a bit too low. I just couldn’t bring myself to add water. That would kill the gorgeous balance of flavors and seasonings I’d added, not that Susanne’s palate could taste them at the moment. It has been scientifically established that chicken soup boosts one’s immune system, so what would watering it down do? Weaken it, I supposed.

Not acceptable. I opened the fridge, remembering Susanne telling me that we still had one jar of homemade stock in there—cue the little oval of Susanne over my shoulder, saying “we still have one jar of homemade stock in there,”—and I stuck my head in, looking for something beige in color, liquid, and in a mason jar.

Alas, this is not as exclusionary as I would have hoped. I smiled, seeing my target, launching my hand upon it, grasping it with my opposable thumb, my marker of humans’ dominance over this realm for the last 50,000 years, and triumphantly emerged with my prize. It did not occur to me that I should check the contents, primarily because the back of our refrigerator is like Siberia, and things only dream of decomposing there. I think there’s a member of the czar family back there. It really limits the usable space in the rest of the fridge, which is kind of annoying.

I will say that I had a moment, half a second at best, where I wondered why the jar didn’t have any fat floating on top, but that thought didn’t slow me down, not one bit. I poured in the entire jar and stirred the pot—lest I be lazy and not really combine the new contents well, or something—and put the lid back on, letting it simmer a bit more before I served any to Susanne.

Several minutes later she passed through the kitchen on her way to the bathroom and noticed that jar of the peach syrup I’d made last summer when canning peaches was sitting, empty, on the counter. Even in her sickened haze, she knew what the jar was, and lifted the lid to the soup. A unique odor of savory chicken and syrupy, peachy goodness greeted her.

She put the lid back on the pot.

I was on the couch, giggling at some news story or other. Oh, the French Canadians! Or oh, that silly Glen Beck!

“Honey,” she asked me gently, “why did you make peach chicken noodle soup?”

“What,” I asked. The poor dear, she was losing her mind. I should do more for her to get her better.

“You put the jar of peach syrup in the soup. Why did you do that?” At this point, she began chuckling.

“Oh no, did I?” I thought it was chicken stock. . . .

“Mm hmm.”

“Crap.”

She did her best and ate half a bowl, and honestly, I think it was only possible because she couldn’t taste a darn thing. For my part, I poured it down the toilet this morning. It’s not a flavor anyone needs to try. Just take my word for it.

Photo by Kevin H. from Flickr.

As an avid watcher of the Daily Show, I watched this week when Jon Stewart “investigated” Chatroulette. For those of you blissfully unaware of this impertinent corner of the online universe, Chatroulette is a Web site in which you get on your Web cam and are randomly matched with someone else on their Web cam. It’s an anonymity-loving paradise, except that, as Jon showed, it’s mostly filled with horny middle-aged men. And reporters looking to find out what the story is.

I wanted to know if that was the beginning, middle, and end of the whole thing, so I fired up my built-in Web cam and I moseyed on up to the Wild Wild Web. Okay, I don’t have to fire it up, it’s just automatic because it’s a Mac, but whatever. I sallied up and got ready for some roulettin’ good time. I will say I was annoyed by my camera, because to be able to see my screen is to have it aimed at a really unflattering angle for my face. But I need to see my screen, so double chin it was.

My first random assignment was . . . a black screen. And yet Chatroulette was telling me to feel free to start talking. Talking? To what? This was weird, too weird. Was it talk therapy? A technical glitch? A–and suddenly, my “partner” disconnected from me and hopped to the next shuffled cammer.

Cammer? Okay, I was a fish in a frying pan with a pool of spilled milk next to me. I was a mess of metaphor. No sooner had I been bumped by the first person than I was wham-blam bumped two more times in extremely rapid succession by other people I barely even saw! Gee, maybe my ego isn’t ready for this, I wondered. It was rapid-fire rejection! After 18 months of job rejection, and 7 months of query letters to agents rejection, could I take this? Was I up for this?

Of course I was! It’s Chatroulette! I steadied myself as the computer hunted for another random assignment. What’s taking so long, I wanted to know. And then, out of the darkness, came. . .

A bald man, with furrowed brow, staring very closely at his screen. I could have sited good places for hair plugs on his scalp. I disconnected. I! I took the power, my power, into my own hands and clicked next! Banished, middle aged staring man! Next up, a bald man? And another. And another.

You know, there was a mid-semester fall break that I took my sophomore year of college, and to save on gas I gave a couple of people a ride back with me. One of them lived in central Pennsylvania, so it wasn’t very far out of the way between Syracuse and New Jersey, but it was unfamiliar enough that I didn’t really know my way around there. I dropped her off and had one more friend in the car, who lived in Clinton, NJ. We tried to find our way back to the highway, but we’d gotten lost and just as I was certain we’d been riding in circles, we spotted a restaurant of the Pennsylvania/New Jersey variety. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a low building with 70s-era brownish brick, big industrial windows and a bakery counter at the register. The only thing not making it a proper diner was the lack of polished chrome and the absence of tableside jukeboxes. It was that kind of restaurant. And even though it was late, it was open, with ten million cars in the parking lot. We walked in to the front, relieved that we could be back on our way soon, until we saw who was in there.

Every single person other than the hostess was a middle aged bald man. 250 bald men.

It’s not a bald thing, really. I’m losing my hair; I know I’ll be among them someday. If they were all blue I would have been just as rattled. Or wearing the same clothes, whatever.

I whispered to the hostess that I needed to find the highway. She wrote down directions for me. I leaned in and asked if this was a convention group.

“How’d ya guess,” she asked me, blandly, chomping on her gum and looking at me like I was the stupidest person she’d ever seen. Not only was I driving around with no idea that the highway was three roads away, but I couldn’t even put it together that the bald convention was meeting here. Sheesh.

We left quickly, agreeing that we should never speak of the experience again. And apparently I have left Georgette in the dust on that one. Sorry, Georgette.

Anyway, maybe the bald men of America have moved into the 21st Century and are now meeting on Chatroulette.

I clicked again, and there it was, a man and his little man. And I mean little. I moved on quickly, hoping to rid my retinas of the sight in short [sic] order.

Three teenage girls sipping at drinks obviously procured at 7-11, giggling. Perhaps they’d just seen what I’d just seen. I made a mental note that any future teenage girls in my household will not have access to Chatroulette. Maybe the Web will be gone by then.

A very fat woman in a light blue bra and matching panties. The moment my face came into view on her screen she began jumping up and down. I clicked next.

Someone had put a Jesus bobblehead figurine on his desk and left the camera there. I heard myself laugh on his computer.

Along the line somewhere, I had drifted into performance art. I tried to look behind me to see the bend I’d gone around.

Another wanker. He and I clicked next at the same time. I wondered who he was looking for. Those giggling girls, I guessed. That thought made me frown, and my next “partner” saw it and typed, “why the sad face,” before they clicked next. It was a rhetorical question, apparently.

Two teenage guys lying on someone’s bed, looking bored. I suspect they were gamers, because they next’ed me faster than anyone else.

A whole room of young women. I waved and clicked next. I was too intimidated!

Another blank screen. Again, what am I supposed to do here, I asked myself. “Hello? Are you there?” No response. Okay, that was just creepy.

Two teen boys again, one in profile. I could hear that they were getting yelled at by a female authority figure, probably because they were on Chatroulette.

I exited the screen, having had enough of all that.

On Twitter I had posted that I’d checked out Chatroulette and sure enough, five minutes later I had three Chatroulette-affiliated friends following my Twitter account. One of these led to some funny screen captures of the way two random chatters can juxtapose in funny ways: two people dressed as Jesus (so maybe Jesus is a thing on the site?), one person dressed as a cop while a wanker looks rather afraid, a person playing air guitar and someone looking like some approximation of Jimi Hendrix.

As a cultural text, it could be interesting. As a way to chat with people, well, I didn’t actually “chat” with anyone. I learned no names, knew any of their stories, and really, I didn’t care to know. But wow, there are a lot of lonely guys out there. I’d say it warranted some evaluation by the government, but I don’t care that much.

Next.

This year winter was like a photo negative of last year; except for a few inches of snow in December, none has fallen on the streets of Walla Walla. The last month didn’t even bluster much, with a few days of overcast and a few days of rain, and a whole lot of days during which we didn’t ask much of the heater in the basement, so it sat there like a sleeping dragon with a chest cold, happy not to cough up any fire for us. Back out in DC all of our friends were moaning, then foaming, then apoplectic about the endless bands of snow that covered absolutely everything. They posted angry statuses on Twitter and Facebook. They took pictures as evidence. With way too much time on their hands, they made time-lapse movies of porches increasingly blanketed, forgotten toys buried, and personal vehicles inconveniently blocked in by an inconceivable amount of frozen precipitation. I watched this all from 3,200 miles away, exhaling in wonder and relief that my nonconsensual isolation in the house from 30 inches of snow and no plowing last year did not repeat itself. It would have been some kind of very cruel irony if I’d been back in DC this winter. And to everyone who had copious amounts of time with their loved ones while they were instructed to stay home, day after agonizing day, you have my sympathy.

Spring clearly has sprung around here, has been springing for a while, actually. The wineries are readying for the tourist onslaught, and people are smiling with notable more frequency, often looking at the big yellow ball in the sky, so happy for their skin to generate some vitamin D, even as their retinas fry away from the radiation.

But this is the Pacific Northwest, well, kind of, and damned if we’re not all still wearing earth tones and lots of black and gray and navy blue. We have to separate ourselves from the color of daffodils, after all, for we might confuse pollinators otherwise. It’s an ecological imperative, see. We feel that much warmer when the sun beats down on our black hoodies than if we were simply wearing a white t-shirt. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing a down vest over a dark gray long-sleeved shirt (or even better, a black hoodie), even if it’s 74 degrees outside because look, just over there, see the mountains? Snow on the mountains! Never mind that they’re 3,000 feet higher than us. If we can see snow, it must be cold.

Some Northwesterners complement these heavy jackets with wool socks and Birkenstock sandals. It’s actually a rather popular look, and it separates the wheat from the chaff; people with any hesitation about wearing socks and sandals together, especially with cargo shorts, have simply not lived in the PacNW long enough. People who wear this combination and live in some other geographic area, you need to put everything you can fit in your car and move out here, because you have some like-minded crazy people out here who really, really want to meet you.

Sure, we enjoy spring. We don’t want to compete with it. We’ll walk through wildflowers and scrub brush, and all the sage that survived becoming tumbleweeds over the reasonably short winter, but we’ll walk through it in ecologically friendly clothing and gear, we’ll take reusable water bottles with us, and some of us will  cover up our tracks on the way back, lest we leave anything behind that wasn’t there before we passed by. And when the temperature hits 100 degrees in June, then fine, okay, we’ll ditch the socks. But the synthetic down vest stays.

I try to listen when the universe at large brings up points for me to consider. A few weeks ago, the message I heard was “be comforting.” I was actually told no fewer than three times, by three entirely different people—a student with twitchy senioritis, a transgender woman on the edge, and a professional who is having difficulty with a superior—that my words to them were comforting. These conversations happened in the midst of the anguishing last stages of a woman’s life here in town, a woman about whom I’ve written before and for whom many people have a particular fondness. And as I’ve seen her caretakers looking increasingly exhausted, the concept of what is comforting, when, and for whom have swirled around in my head. We often forget, it seems, to support the caretakers, and they, the front guard, need a lot of comfort themselves.

On another level, we attempt to provide comfort for the terminally ill, in the form of hand-holding and increasingly desperate dosages of opioids. It’s the medical equivalent of building a sea castle. We wring our hands when we fear our efforts aren’t enough, and of course they’re not enough. And so we hope that our well wishes, our prayers, our food offerings—for surely they can’t concentrate on cooking, for God’s sake—will do enough for now. Sometimes hope and a bite of warm supper is all we have.

The message this week, if I’ve got it correctly, is not to lie. Surely this is something my parents and a plethora of clergy attempted to teach me when I was a child. The script back then was simply that lying is wrong, a concept predicated on a young person’s monolithic understanding of morality: you do right just because. You avoid doing wrong just because.

What I see about lies now, on the cusp of my fourth decade, is the devastation in their wake, like the wrecked ideals of a partner who has put such effort into someone he then realizes doesn’t have his best interest at heart. Or the sudden calamity that avalanches down on a person who gets laid off after disingenuous promises from her boss that she can trust him. It’s not the lies themselves, necessarily, that are wrong, because who really wants to hear that they look awful in their favorite pair of trousers, it’s the shock wave from the lies and the intent in the heart of the liar that we want to avoid.

In an online writing chat today there was much discussion about lying in fiction. Yes, I know, it’s fiction. I think “lie” stood in, on several occasions, for “believability.” It does raise an interesting question to me. We’re so quick as readers to spot flaws in what makes a story believable or not—we come into a book with cynical expectations and have our guards up for the first sign of trouble. But these are just books. Raise the stakes and talk about people and relationships, ask us to make an investment in what they mean to us, and we become myopic, willing to believe even preposterous tales just to keep our vision of reality stable. And then we lose, bit by bit, our own sense of well-being and comfort, because while we may not want to admit to it, our confidence erodes under the constant swell of those lies.

I am not immune to any of this, and when I was ten, fifteen years younger, I went to lies as a coping strategy, oh sure, I did. I am a storyteller, after all, but I’d lost sight of where make-believe was okay and where it wasn’t. I’ve spent time in the prison camp of cowardice, aligning myself with dominant personalities and then wondering how I could squirm out from under them. Mostly I just figured out how to exist in the cramped space they allowed me, but one of those survival skills was lying. It didn’t even matter after a time what the lie was about, as long as I had something all to myself, a tiny corner of truth about which they didn’t know. These were infinitesimally small victories; stacked all together I could have fit them on the head of a pin, but they were mine, mine, mine, and somehow they were enough, mostly because my dreams were absurdly small.

And then, though they were so tiny, they were numerous, and like the Big Bang that arose out of a submicroscopic particle, they exploded all over me and I had to admit to them and myself what I had been doing. I was a juggler of little lies who had slipped. But it helped me to see what a waste of time all of that nonsense really was. I hadn’t been ready to let go of them, but they left all on their own, and lo and behold, I found new ways to meet people. In fact, I met better people, ones who would never corner me until I found my 5-year-old self’s coping strategy. It was like moving to a house with a dishwasher, me promising never to go back. Who wants to go back to scalding their hands, after all?

I’m inclined toward direct, unwavering truth-telling these days, even as it has sometimes meant making difficult decisions, like oh, turning my life upside-down and living as the opposite gender (and not just so I could write a book about the experience). But it is a life unafraid, at least.

And uh, I take comfort in that.

I come here on Monday afternoons because my favorite coffee haunt is closed, but truth be told, they make a very good cup of coffee at this place, which I suppose one can achieve when one has roasted the beans that very morning. This place also has the benefit of sitting at the foothills of the Blue Mountains, so if one cares to say, type on one’s laptop outside, on say, an overcast day in which one can actually read one’s screen, one can take in the beauty of snowcapped moutains, even in July.

There is a downside, namely a professor from one of the town’s institutions of higher learning who tends to date his students. He does that lean in too close to gauge your reaction thing that pushy people do. I mean, this is never directed to me, of course, given that he seems to focus on people other than fat, nearing-middle-age men who wear wedding bands. I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet, I suppose. But he absolutely flees my presence whenever I show up. I’ve never said one word to him, though I’ve heard several of his conversations with coeds. One time, at the start of the fall semester, a newly minted alum sat across from him, at the table next to me.

“I’m so glad we waited,” she cooed, not nearly enough under her breath.

“I’m so glad you’re here.” He has, it goes without saying, unwavering eye contact. Their hands were mere inches from each other, teasing at touching.

“Summer took so long,” she said, and I felt a shudder of uncomfortableness go through me. “But it’s so worth it.”

“You packed everything,” he asked. My mind, against my will, flashed to a pill container of ecstasy, some bright pink rope, and a French maid’s outfit. I cursed myself for forgoing my iPod that day. I would have listened to anything to drown them out: metalhead, steampunk. Slam poetry. And I really detest slam poetry.

Before I was an unwilling witness to this grotesquery of a dating lead-in, he didn’t really notice me if we were in the same space. But since then, he has absolutely fled the room when I come in, or if I’m somewhere ahead of him, he doesn’t stay for long. I wonder if I’ve raised one too many eyebrows or if he realized I was disgusted by his machinations with the barely-legal set. I don’t speak to him, so I don’t know.

A few months ago I decided to conduct a decidedly not scientific experiment to see if maybe we were just two ill-timed ships attempting to pass in the night, like the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. Well, that didn’t go so well, I suppose. But, I thought, perhaps this was just a schedule conflict. And seeing as I have this amazingly flexible schedule, well, why not sneak a peek into some kind of insight?

I have thus showed up at the roastery at 11am, noon, 1pm, and 2pm. And each time I come in, if he’s here before me or comes in after, he stays an average of 14 minutes and then skeedaddles. Sometimes he’s had to gulp down his beverage, other times he seemed to be blithely carrying on, typing into his laptop or grading papers. But in each case, he was gone, usually less than a quarter hour later.

I’m not sure what this is about. I don’t think of myself as an intimidating figure, in my Merrel sneakers and comfortable hoodie that continually proclaims “Capitol Hill”, confusing anyone from that Seattle neighborhood. (It’s for the other Capitol Hill, FYI.) Maybe he’s embarrassed that I heard him that day, which means he knows what he’s doing is wrong. Or perhaps I’m just so handsome he figures he has no chance with a pretty girl if I’m even in his vicinty, and the idea that he’s cock-fighting with me nearly drives me into peals of hysterical laughter.

Anyway, he’s around so often when I’m writing that I’m a little concerned he’s going to make it into one of my stories, or that sexual predatory-ness will become some kind of unconscious theme in my work, and then people will be wondering about me, not him.

And then, at long last, the terrorists will have won. Damn it.