Panpocalypse Week Six: Tomboygirl
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a queer disabled woman takes to biking through a shutdown New York City in search for the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart.
Click here for Week Five.
Tomboygirl
I have long let women and girls tell me what to do. My first crush-slash-best-friend I call Tomboygirl. She’s two years older than me and lives around the corner in a house with a piano and beautiful rugs. Her mother listens to calming talk radio that I won’t know until college is NPR, and she has two older brothers whom I also worship. Both brothers have long, feathered, blond hair and they both know how to fight. We consider one brother good and one evil, but it’s the evil brother who carries me home bleeding one day after I step on a bottle cap. It’s romantic, because he looks the most like Tomboygirl, and the neighborhood kids trail behind saying, “Ooooh” and “Ahhh” and “Sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” He carries me like a bride and I hold on to his neck while trailing blood from my foot. If you think my life is like a fairy tale but just the bloody parts, you are not wrong.
Sometimes when we’re bored, Tomboygirl and I press our backs to the evil brother’s locked bedroom door and listen to whatever he’s listening to, mostly a song about Jojo a man who thought he was a woman. I am that accident kid, the one who needs protectors. I wasn’t supposed to take my shoes off, but the other kids did and the grass felt so nice until the terrible pinch of the rusty bottle cap.
Shoe interlude. Shoe stanza. Shoe paragraph. Robot dictator does not want to learn the word “shoe.”
Tomboygirl has shoes I covet, and because there is something wrong with me that nobody knows, I cannot walk in them. Because I cannot accept my deformities, I beg my parents for these shoes. Clogs.
Hers are red with stitching on the top. Her feet are beautiful unlike mine, which are twisted and flat. She slides them on while I wait outside the screen door. Her mother imposes rules that my mother doesn’t. I am often not allowed in. Tomboygirl asks permission for everything and yet she is wild and free. The door opens, she runs out, clacking ahead of me, ass tight, long legs, thighs strong in short shorts. I don’t understand how the clogs stay on her feet but they do, and I run after her.
Dr. Scholl’s sandals. The ads say they massage your feet. My mother thinks they are ridiculous. Tomboygirl runs in these too, but mostly she and two older girls who hate me clack up and down the street talking about grown-up things.
“Things you don’t understand,” says Anita of the long tan legs. I think if I had the Dr. Scholl’s I could do this too.
“You’ll kill yourself in those,” my mother says.
One summer at Hills, which is like Kmart but shittier, there are knock-off Dr. Scholl’s. I beg and nag. I am known in my family for nagging, for being relentless.
“Please mommy please mommy please please please can I have the sandals.”
“Fine, put them in the cart and stop nagging.”
To me Hills is a magical place full of makeup, shoes, records, and jewelry.
When we get home it’s twilight. I cut the tags and slip on my fake Dr. Scholl’s like Cinderella with her painful glass slipper. I’m more like a stepsister though, because they hurt. I go outside and find some kids, maybe Cammie, who is younger than me and always around. I clack up and down our block talking about the sandals and how amazing they feel until I get blisters and go home.
“They’re just as good as Dr. Scholl’s,” I say. And I truly think they are beautiful. I love the sound they make against the sidewalk even though they hurt and I think I’m gonna fall. The younger girls nod and take it in. Tomboygirl is not there but I’ll show her tomorrow.
I’m mimicking the way my mom and her best friend talk about clothes and shoes: a kind of whimsical necessity, a kind of freedom from their lives as secretaries. I love shopping with my mom; to this day we still have fun doing it.
Later that summer I find scuffed white clogs at a garage sale. I use allowance money to buy them. They have a strap that you can fold back or on top.
This will work, I think to myself, but they hurt just as much. What I love about them in the end is the shoe-polish brush I use to paint them bright white every day. I always sit next to my father while he shines his shoes, but now I have my own pair to fuss over and buff. A butch act. I don’t know, I don’t understand gender; you tell me.
Head Destroyer 9000
I get into a thing with my eye. If I wake up tomorrow as a giant bug, don’t be surprised. Except for I won’t have to worry about coming out of my room and embarrassing my family, because no one is here. I can just be that bug. Lie on the couch like I’ve done way too much the last three days, on my back, kicking up my disgusting little bug feet and waving my antennae in the air. Beetle on her back. Couch bug. Sad cockroach.
First I think I slept on my face and that’s why my eye hurts. Last night I dreamed that my old boyfriend was holding me down and I woke up panicky and grouchy. He never did that in real life, but he was often trying to keep me from doing queer, poly things. Still, I miss him. When I used to get off the couch, he would gently push my butt up to help me stand. It was sweet.
Sore eye. I tell Twitter I slept on my face and only the poet Jim Behrle likes it. He gets it. He understands sleeping on your face.
At night I look more closely in the mirror and see that I’m getting a stye. Googling too much leads me to the beautiful word chalazion, plural chalazia, which is another kind of eyelid bump caused by contacts or bacteria or a blocked tear duct. I haven’t been crying enough. Too stunned to cry. Too medicated to cry. Or I cry in one horrible gush into my mask.
“If I am ever to become a Greek goddess, please name me Chalazion—seer and guardian of disabled queers, old women who protest, and sick eyeballs.”
If I am ever to become a Greek goddess, please name me Chalazion—seer and guardian of disabled queers, old women who protest, and sick eyeballs.
My stye distracts me from my couch wallowing. I make hot compresses and take selfies with them. Peak boredom. I should have gone out today, but I didn’t care enough. I should probably call my neurologist but I don’t. Not yet. How miserable do I have to get before I ask for help?
I miss my kid, but I try to give her space and not call every day. Smother mother. Before she left, she showed me a new game on Roblox called Head Destroyer 9000. The colors of the game are super pride flag and eighties neon, and you move your little avatar around to various stations in which you can get your head crushed. There’s no blood, just a countdown, the head smash, and then you emerge from a station with a narrow or squashed flat head. After a few minutes of frantic running around, your head pops back into shape.
“That’s it?” I ask her. “It just smashes heads?”
“Yeah,” she says, aligning her avatar, which has short shorts, wings, and a side pony bouffant today, into a head-smashing station. “Wait for it.”
And I do, and it’s deeply satisfying.
I both do and don’t want to make a big metaphor out of this game. It is just quite pleasing to destroy yourself for a moment in a game in which you are both you and a pixelated version of you. Cartoons allows for so much of this kind of smashing, but not self-smashing. Gen Z and Gen X really align. The pointless smashing of it all.
But it’s also like 2020. When you think you can handle the next thing, there’s killer hornets or fucking white supremacists murdering George Floyd by kneeling on his neck. At a protest you sing “Happy Birthday” to Breonna Taylor and you start to cry, because what is America planning on doing about the legacies of slavery? She should be alive and eating an amazing cake. We shouldn’t even know her, because she got to live. And of course there’s COVID, which never ends and you can’t touch anyone unless you’re already partnered or your germ bubble didn’t desert you, and it ALL DESTROYS THE HEAD. 9000. And then your head comes back and you do something. Tomorrow, I hope to leave the apartment.
Bunny
I join another protest with Lana, my bike, at Stonewall for #Blacktranslivesmatter #ninapop #tonymcdade. All queer people, Black queers and white allies, and in the park across from Stonewall, we listen to the stories of our Black trans sisters and brothers and why they are here today and what they need from us and America. Basics that are the hardest to come by in this country: free medical care, dignity, respect, love, money, being able to #walkwhiletrans and use the bathroom of their gender. Mostly they want to live and be left alone.
At every protest I’ve been to these last two weeks, there are activists moving through the crowd offering masks, hand sanitizer, fruit, nuts, protein bars, water, tampons, and homemade kits in baggies with all of the above. This level of care among activists doesn’t surprise me. I know the caring of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and I’ve been coming to this park for the last couple of months sitting here and watching elder queers talk with younger queers, and share drinks and French fries. Still, I hope the world knows how marginalized people have been caring for one another for centuries.
I come to this march with one of my favorite former students and her girlfriend. They are very cute together on Instagram and IRL, and protective of me, which I don’t mind.
“Are you comfortable? Is this a good spot for us? Can you see?” my former student asks.
I nod a lot because it’s hot and the effort to talk through my mask is wearing me out. We march through the park and out into the street in front of Stonewall. Behind me I see my friend Bunny and her lover, Memphis, and I squeal. We make air hugs at each other. I haven’t seen Bunny in months and Memphis in even longer, and they are dear to me. Another former student who helped me come out with her wisdom around pansexuality is also right next to us.
“I haven’t been outside in three months,” my former student says. “And this is my roommates’ first protest.”
We are a little hub, a group—a gaggle, the podcast Nancy would say, for a queer group of friends.
“Bunny, Bunny,” I say. “I wish I could touch you. I’m so happy to see you.”
“I knew this would be good for you,” she says to me. Bunny, who is younger than me, but really my queer elder, the woman who told me to write about my queer self, to be out on the page and not just in bed. Bunny of the beautiful long fingers and deep astrological wisdom.
“Our hair!” I say to Memphis because we are both growing mullets. There is nothing to do with hair but wait, allow it to go feral, and for me, gray.
As we chant and dance, the crowd surges and pulses with a queer joy that is so different than mostly straight marches. There’s a banner hanging over the Stonewall Inn entrance that says, “Stonewall was a riot!” and we scream as we pass it.
I remember the one time Eurydice and I went to Stonewall for a drink. As we sit at the bar and order martinis, her hair falls over her eyes and I kiss her hard and long because I can. It’s Stonewall and nobody fucking cares.
“Babe,” she says. “Babe, you’re making me wet.”
“Good,” I say and settle back onto my barstool.
We start talking to the man next to us. His name is Faustus, and I shit you not, it turns out he’s a professional jouster for one of those traveling medieval shows.
“You are not,” I say, flirting because he’s a man and Eurydice is a woman and they would make a perfect sandwich around me.
“Do you want to see a video?” he asks.
We nod and then watch him, dressed as a knight, fake joust with another man dressed as a knight, both on horses, while the crowd goes wild.
“Our very own knight in shining arming,” Eurydice says, flirting now too. For my sake or maybe she’s also attracted to him? She’s told me she likes to cuddle with men but is very proud of her gold-star status. I hate gold stars for any behavior and gold-star lesbians are annoying, but I tolerate it in her because I love her.
An older fellow at the other end of the bar buys Faustus a drink, and we lose him. Later, we go up to the dance floor, and for one hour there’s magical dancing, because it’s lesbian/bi-girls’ night and the DJ is really good. I’m not sure you know the utter joy of fifty queer women shaking their asses to Britney’s “. . . Baby One More Time” and TLC’s “No Scrubs.” My joke about “No Scrubs” has always been that I love scrubs and that guy “hanging out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride, trying to holler at me” has always been my type of dude.
Eventually I see that Eurydice has had too many drinks. She’s an amazing, athletic dancer, and she’s doing drops and moves around me that make me think I might fall down, because while I’m cute on the dance floor I can’t do moves. Choreography eludes my disabled self, though I suspect if I ever had a patient, kind teacher, instead of a huffy, bitchy straight girl trying to teach me, I might have succeeded.
Remember, I am spaz. But there is some kind of rhythm that takes over me that helps me dance and makes it fun and nice for me. Another girl is dancing with us and it seems like there’s a competitive vibe between them for me? or for each other? which I can’t figure out and I start to feel bad. Those two are drunk. I’m a little buzzed, but mostly alcohol hurts my muscles.
So we leave and have a fight on the street that makes no sense to me.
“You’re hot and I want to show you off,” she says.
“I can’t dance like that and if you dance around me too closely I lose my balance and I can fall.”
“That girl wanted you,” she pouts.
“I really think she wanted you,” I counter.
Around and around until I say, “Enough, you’re drunk, let’s talk about it in the morning.” At my place I tuck her in because I’m an enabler and I look at her while she sleeps. She’s so pretty. She’s so handsome. She’s a mess. I’m a mess. You’re lucky, I say to myself, and press my butt up against her.
“Babe,” she mumbles at me in her sleep and pulls me closer.
That touch I once took for granted. People in beds pulling me closer to them. Someone, her, calling me babe. A crowd of queers dancing and sweating on each other in a club. Will we ever have that again? I wonder if Eurydice somewhere at the protest today. I have a desperate wish to see her, because I think if she sees me she will remember that I’m human and worthy of connection. That I’m not just a ghost.
I turn around and search for her lanky body and poof of wavy, brown hair. But I don’t see her. I look back and she’s never there. Stonewall falls behind me too, or for a second I have a vision of that place in its older, darker, hidden time. When queens like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera ruled the space, the drinks were watery, and there was just a jukebox for dancing. What if the new Le Monacle is hidden inside of Stonewall? Or maybe it’s in someone’s apartment and we’ll all be given rubber suits before we’re even let in.
The crowd moves, turns onto another street. I maneuver Lana, but she’s getting heavy and I know that the bikes should go to the side or the back. My knees are starting to ache and I tell my friends I have to go.
Later that night on Twitter, I see that cops attacked the protesters. Bunny texts me that things got violent and they had to scatter.
“There were easily five thousand of us. At least that’s what I heard a cop say.”
“I love you,” I text her.
“Love you too, Raccoon,” which is the nickname she uses for me.
One the protesters, writer and activist Jason Rosenberg, reports that the cops beat him so badly he broke his arm and needed six staples in his head.
Guapo and Pauline run a not-for-profit writers’ room and library in Bushwick, and they are posting prompts that center BIPOC writing and activist work. Tonight’s is especially meaningful considering that we need to keep the pressure on the government while making sure we don’t burn out.
Created by Deepa Iyer, a South Asian American writer, strategist, lawyer, and racial justice advocate, in her amazing essay “Mapping Our Social Change Roles in Times of Crisis,” the prompts ask us to write about and reflect on our roles in social change.
I invite you to take some time to write and reflect on your potential roles. Use the prompts. If you want to send them to me, you can find me on Lex and most recently Tinder. I’m Orpheus and Fragmentedsky.
