The Ballad of Beau and Marcie

Testosterone brought things into focus, things Beau had come to terms with never understanding. Things Beau was downright afraid of understanding. The first few months on T brought on his new, second adolescence, and with it an incredible sexual awakening. He saw lust in the eyes of newscasters, felt the eyes of every man on Castro Street following him. Strange things turned him on, things he never considered before; the shape of a smooth, curved glass lamp, the slow arch of Marcie's morning yawn, these were enough to keep him rubbing himself raw for hours. It wasn't just physical lust, it was a shift in perception. The newscaster, the lamp, every man in the Castro, they were there for him, not only did they want him to get off, but they wanted him, they wanted him with pure animal lust. There was a part of his brain that thought, if he took them, used them for his own pleasure, they would enjoy it. They were waiting for it.

He began to realize that this was what separated the men from the boys, and the good men from the bad men. The knowledge that your perception is only your own, the ability to control this violent and lustful animal nature, and the morality to consider the wellbeing of anything outside of yourself, this is what it meant to be a man. Rape was never, ever something he wanted to be able to understand, but he did now, and sometimes he hated himself for it. There were moments with Marcie, in the final moments before they both came, him on top of her in bed with even just his hand inside her, that he would lose himself completely. If something went wrong, if she needed him to stop, he wasn't sure that he could. He didn't always trust himself to keep some kind of human, moral control. It wasn't him there anymore, it was someone else, some animal thing inside of him. For a time he felt like the edge was getting closer each day and it terrified him more than anything.

He thought, "If I can look at that lamp and get turned on, feel like it wants me, where is the line? What stops me from looking at children that way?"

He started to understand his uncle, the man down the street, his best friends dad, all the men who looked at his three, seven, ten, and fourteen year old little girls body and thought "This is mine, this is for me. Nothing else matters." It was a horrible thought, a horrible understanding. He grew afraid of even looking at women, and especially at children, he was so afraid of even having those thoughts. He knew he could never intentionally do anything to hurt someone, especially a child, especially Marcie, but just knowing how blurry that line could be atrophied him. He stopped going out, he shut himself off from Marcie for fear of hurting her.

After a few months things leveled off for him, his new animalistic responses became a baseline for everyday life. Marcie began to understand and so did he. He knew now that he was one of the good ones, one of the men who knew where the line was and that it should never be crossed.

Zane’s meds, the T, and the Amoxicillin were stashed in the grease stained paper bag, obscured by the half eaten donuts. They weren’t sure about the vanilla, they didn’t understand why it might be illegal to cross the border with a cooking extract, besides maybe the vague alcohol content, but the fact that they only saw it in pharmacies made them cautious. It got thrown down into the bottom of the bag, under the wine glasses, carefully wrapped in yesterday’s Nuevo Dia. All of that went in the pack under Marcie’s sweater, and they were off to wait in the line for the American border crossing.

The line was about two hundred people long but was moving.

“Crap.” Marcie said.

“What?” Beau thought she was just nervous.

“We forgot cigarettes,” she tried to be quieter about that last part. The legality of cigarette buying was also kind of hazy to them. They knew taking boxes full wasn't okay, but a pack was definitely okay, where the line was drawn between legal and not was fuzzy.

“Oh. Ok.” Beau said, and they stepped out of line and went to the nearest magazine shop, only about fifty feet away from the wall. They got Maggie’s carton of Camels, some strange Mexican candy and a small wrapped package that had two, apparently pornographic, Spanish language comic books. Those things all went in Marcie’s backpack and they got back in line. It was moving pretty fast.

Every time Beau went across, it amazed him that everything was so cursory. He saw tons of the people ahead of them walk right through and his heartbeat slowed down. If there was one thing Beau had come to trust it was the fact that everyone, everyone, regardless of skill or pay level, hated their job. When it came down to it, no matter what your job, you were doing it for someone else and it was keeping you from doing something you would rather do more, for yourself. And that people who hated their jobs, took every opportunity to cut corners in getting to the next punch out. These people hated doing their job just as much as anyone else. It was an assembly line, where you didn’t even have to assemble anything. Person, ID, dumb question, wave through, person, ID, dumb question, wave through, day in and day out. It didn’t matter if they were “government officials” or checking the bearings going down the line at the Ford plant, there was something they would rather be doing.

When Beau and Marcie got to the turnstile, Beau showed his California driver’s license and the very bored looking man looked him up and down and asked him what country he was a citizen of.

“The good ole US of A” Beau hoped that the lightheartedness of his response would pass on to Marcie. Beau got waved through.

When Marcie came through she showed her DL and got the same question.

She also got, “Can you open the backpack for me ma’am?” and Beau tried not to seem concerned when he looked back. His stomach felt tight and he wondered if she got searched because she crossed the border with a dark man.

Marcie unzipped the pack as the man asked, “What’cha got in there?”

Marcie was cool with it, rifled through some things nonchalantly and said, “Let’s see. Some wine glasses, a sweater, a ring, half a donut.”

But the carton of cigarettes was right on top.

“What about that?” the man said as he pointed to the carton of cigarettes, on top of everything.

“Right. Well, I assumed you knew what those were,” Marcie smiled as she nodded towards the left breast pocket of his uniform; there was an identical pack of camels in there.

“You’re required to declare those, ma’am,” he tried to sound stern but was still sounding bored.

“Ok, then,” Marcie was loud and official and looked the guard directly in the eye. “I declare one carton of Camel cigarettes.”

“Technically you are limited to 60 individual cigarettes. I’m going to have to confiscate all but two packs of those,” he was being a dick and loving himself for it. He probably hadn't paid for cigarettes in years.

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know that. Okay,” she smiled as she opened the carton, took two packs and handed over the carton. Beau couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or trying to be all sweetness and light to overwhelm the guard with obvious compliance. He suspected the guard couldn’t tell either. She threw the two packs in the bag, zipped it up calmly. She smiled again and he waved her through.

Emily and Beau had a fabulous three-week affair just before Beau left town. Emily came on to Beau at a bar one night and they started sleeping together. After three sex-filled September days Beau felt obligated to tell her.

“You know, I’m leaving town in a month,” he said while they were lying naked in bed one morning. Emily didn’t skip a beat.

“That’s fabulous,” she said, there wasn’t a hint of sarcasm. “I have a horrible fear of commitment. In fact I’ve never dated anyone for more than a month and a half.”

“Well then, this should work out perfectly,” Beau laughed, and from there on for three weeks it was just fun and good. They went out and partied, had sex in bathrooms, in cars, or sometimes just never even got around to leaving the house.

When they went out they would drink and dance, sometimes just drink. But Emily was a very different type of drunk than Maria. Where Maria would get needy, depressed and self-hating, and finally pass out over the toilet, Emily would get belligerent and fearless, turn into superwoman and want to wrestle and fuck all night. She was never mean to Bo, just angry at the world and excited and drunk enough to scream at anything she didn’t like. She’d wear slinky ass hugging jeans out to the bar, keep her shirt on with one button and belittle every man who even so much as glared at her on the street.

“What are you looking at fucker? Suck my dick asshole!” Bo loved it, it made him hot to see a femme kick some dude’s ass, even if it was just verbally.

After three weeks, ahead of schedule as far as Bo knew, Emily stopped calling. On one hand Bo worried himself sick. After what happened to Maria he got twitchy just having his girlfriend out of sight for more than twenty minutes, he automatically assumed she was getting raped in some back alley somewhere. On the other hand he knew Emily could hold her own, and he pitied the man who would try anything with her, he would get a pink stitched stiletto up his ass.

Besides, Tucson was a small town and it only took a few days for Bo to get word of Ricky seeing her at Congress or Jo seeing her at the Surly Wench. It was hard to loose track of people in a town that small. A week later, and only two days before Bo left for Frisco he saw her at Plush. She was at the bar with Shady, all up on her, Shady acting like Emily was some kind of small dog on a short leash. Beau was angry.

They never had the kind of thing going where they were obligated to each other, and they certainly weren’t anything like girlfriends, but Bo felt ditched and dissed. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it, but he did like her and didn’t want to lose her friendship after he left either. He walked right up to her at the bar.

“Can I talk to you outside for a minute?” he asked. She was sorry, and ashamed, Bo could see that right away.

“Yeah. Of course. Hold on,” she said as she leaned over to Shady, said something and motioned to the door.

Shady said something curt and looked up at Beau. Shady was a dick; everyone knew that. The kind of butch that stops remembering that she’s a chick at all and starts assuming all that white male privilege bullshit. She was in the air force; she worked at the DM base on the outside of town. She treated femmes and straight women like they were lesser people and butches and straight men like they were brothers, in the club. It drove Beau crazy.

Emily followed Bo outside. Bo stayed stone, he didn’t even have to say anything. As soon as she looked at him, she started crying. Bawling, apologizing, telling him he deserved better than someone like her. He just stood there and listened. He wanted to put his arms around her, make her stop crying but he was afraid that was too much. Finally, she stopped for a minute.

“Would you please look at me? Look at me Bo. You won’t even look at me,” she said and Bo realized that he had been staring at the ground this whole time. He also knew that as soon as he looked at her he would start crying too. Just as he turned his eyes up to look at her Shady came outside and saw them, Bo, trying to play it cool, leaning up against the trash can and Emily red-faced, crying her eyes out against the wall.

“What the fuck is going on?” she started yelling at them, then at Bo. “You’re making my woman cry asshole. Leave her the fuck alone.”

“Bo didn’t do anything, Shady. Its alright. I’ll be back in in a minute,” Emily tried to calm her down.

Shady was still yelling, now at her, “I just got a fucking beer in there and when I’m done with that I’m coming back out here and we’re going home just like I said we were gonna do, got it?”

“Yeah, yeah Shady. It’s all right. I’ll come back in in a minute,” Emily was using her calm voice, she stopped crying and Shady went back inside.

“What the fuck was that ‘my woman’ bullshit?” Bo asked.

“I don’t know. That’s just the way she is, everyone knows that,” Emily tried to downplay it.

“Look. You know I don’t care what or who you do, we never had that kind of thing going. I just feel a little ditched is all. I’m… I’m leaving on Tuesday and I want to still be friends with you after that. I think you’re a good person and I like you,” Bo was proud of his calm response.

“Fuck Bo. That’s it. I like you too. I love you Bo,” she paused when she realized what she said. “But you’re too nice to me. You’re too good. You deserve better than me. You deserve better than the way I treated you.”

Shady came back out and glared at both of them, and said, “Me and the boys are getting shots. When that’s done we’re fucking leaving,” and went back inside.

“And you deserve better than that,” Bo motioned to the still swinging door. Emily shrugged. “Shady, Emily? She’s a republican for christ sakes. She’s a gay republican. You know better than that.”

Emily laughed for the first time all night, there were still tears running down her reddened cheeks. She was beautiful in the yellow streetlight.

“I know. We don’t talk about that,” she put her arms around him then, and buried her warm face in Bo’s neck. Bo stroked her hair out of her face and kissed her cheek.

“I want us to be friends okay?” he said. She nodded at him. “I want us to still talk after I leave.” She nodded again. “I love you too.”

They heard the door start to open then and jumped away from each other. It was Shady, she didn’t catch them holding each other, but was angry at their general proximity.

“What the fuck are you doing out here? YOU are MINE you understand that?” she yelled at Emily. “I’m going in there and getting OUR jackets and the WE are LEAVING.”

That was the last straw for Bo, “EMILY belongs to EMILY. Maybe you should let her make her own decisions.” Bo was so calm and solid and right, Shady just stepped back inside and slammed the door hard behind her.

“I should go,” Emily said. She held him tight for a moment and kissed his cheek again. She looked him in the eyes and could see they were both teary again. “Call me once you’re out there,” she said, and turned away and inside to the bar.

Bo walked down the street to the Surly Wench and got a beer.

On Wednesday Maria called again, again late at night. This time she was really depressed, not even flirty anymore. She started talking about how nothing was worth it, how she didn’t like being so alone, how she couldn’t handle another night alone. She didn’t sound like she was coming on to him this time, she sounded suicidal. Bo worked on a crisis line in college and he knew the sound. He also knew how it felt. He talked her down a bit and tried to get her to stay on the phone with him.

“I’d feel better if you came over here for a bit. Maybe we could watch a movie or something. Just so I know you’re okay,” he told her.

“I can’t. I mean. I don’t think I should drive,” she said. Bo should have caught on that it meant she was drinking, but she sounded fine so he just thought she was crying or already in bed or something. They talked for a while more and finally she told him that she felt better, like she could drive, and asked if she could come over.

“Sure. Sure you can.” It was one thirty in the morning.

When she showed up at his door she looked awful, she looked like she had still been crying on the way over. He hugged her hello and stayed a polite distance away from her as they sat on his floor and talked. Bo didn’t have much furniture yet so the only other option in his little studio was the bed. She seemed so delicate; he didn’t want to scare her away. Besides, he certainly wasn’t interested in getting up on someone who was so confused and upset.

They talked until dawn. She told him about growing up in Tucson. They had a lot of the same experiences, abuse, incest, rape. She had brother named Danny that was a seven years older. He would corner her in the bathroom and make her touch him until he came on her six year old face. That went on for years, she never knew it was wrong or bad. He always told her he was helping her “practice for being a grown up,” so she never complained.

By the time she was in fifth grade, her brother was a Barrio Libre member, and helping with the coke distro for some of the SoCal brothers. When he found her “practicing” with her boyfriend at home he freaked out. He pulled his .22 out of his pants and hit the boy with it, the seventh grader went flying across the room and hit the ground crying, afraid to get up. Maria was still on her knees. He grabbed his sisters head and pushed her mouth down onto the barrel of the gun at his crotch. She could see he was getting hard underneath.

“This is mine, Mija. You understand? Comprende?” he shouted at her. He pulled out and backhanded her down to the floor. He left then and they both heard his truck screech out of the driveway. Her boyfriend left, holding his bloody cheek and didn’t talk to her after that. She didn’t try to get any other boyfriends either, all of the awkward teenage advances were denied. When she was in tenth grade one of her brothers friends, Chuy, another gang Barrio Libre hijo walked in on them. This time it was the friend that made a scene.

“That’s your fucking sister man. Tu familia! You disgusting maracón!” he started screaming at him. Maria ran out of the room.

“Get the fuck out of here man. This is my business, not yours,” Danny yelled back.

“Chinga tu madre tambien?! Puta! Pinche maracón!” Chuy shouted and he slammed the door and left.

Next time Danny was out on a run, he dropped off the stuff and one of the guys stopped him on the way out.

“I heard your sisters got a sweet little mouth, cabrón,” he said. Danny’s face dropped. “You better cut that shit little bro. We don’t need anymore attention.”

Chuy chimed in from the back of the room, “Besides, she’s your fucking sister you sick motherfucker.”

Danny lost it, he was raging. He lunged at Chuy and the first and bigger chulo jumped in front of him. Danny reached into the front of his pants for his gun and with hardly any movement or sound at all Chuy walked right up to him and shot him point blank in the stomach.

“Sonofabitch. What did you do that for? Now we have to clean up this shit too,” the other one said.

“He was giving it to his own sister, man. We don’t need that kind,” and he spit on Danny’s shocked and gasping face. They threw him in the back of the pickup and left him outside the emergency room at the University hospital. The next day Chuy and the gang rinsed out the truck bed real good and Danny died at the hospital.

After her brother died, Maria started dating Chuy, he was always so nice to her, so gentle. When he finally told her how her brother got shot, she stopped going with him; she stopped everything. She stayed at home. She was a year away from graduating and getting pretty good grades up until then so her mom made arrangements to just get her GED. She never told anyone what she knew, or anything about what happened, everyone just though she checked out of life because she was so heartbroken about her brother’s death. Bo was the only one she told the whole story to.

After she got her GED she went to college up in Phoenix and met her husband, a tall red haired white guy who sounded pretty average, but decent enough. She only felt safe back in Tucson because she had her married name now, and Chuy and a lot of the old gang were in jail by now.

Bo didn’t know why she was telling him all this. He told her about growing up and being forced to play a similar game with his uncle. His mothers oldest brother would sit him down and wrap his tiny five-year-old girl hands around his half hard cock. The game was that Bo had to follow orders, it was a perverse game of Simon Says.

“Open. Close. Open. Close. Pull. Push. Open. Close.” He would mumble orders at the girl as his breathing got quicker and his words got meaner. It was always like that. Bo didn’t always want to play. Once Bo ran away from him, only to be pulled back with such force that it dislocated his tiny shoulder. No one believed him when he tried to explain so no one even took him to the doctor for two days. That shoulder still made popping noises twenty years later.

Bo wished someone had shot his uncle, fantasized about it himself when the abuse and beatings were still going on years later. His uncle always had something to do at his house, or in his room. The only reason he never leveled the families old hunting rifle at his uncle was that he knew if he did, he would be sent to juvee, and from juvee you can kiss college goodbye, and then he would be back living with his family again. College was his only way out, he just had to grin and bear it until then. He ran away a few times, slept in his old Buick or stayed with friends for most of high school, but he made it out and made it to college on a scholarship.

When the sky turned that cobalt morning blue outside Bo’s window they realized they had been up all night. Maria got nervous again and shy. They had both spilled their guts and were completely exhausted. She hurriedly said goodbye and Bo watched her go out to her car in the sunrise. She was beautiful.

Back then, Bo was Debbie's driver. That meant he drove her out to the Dude's house in his big black pickup - the girls called it his BDT, Big Dyke Truck. He would let her out and wait for an hour. In around an hour she would come out again and say the Dude had paid for another X number of hours and hand him the cash and he would wait some more, usually read, maybe do some homework or a crossword for a few hours. Or she would hop back in the truck and he'd drive her home. Or maybe she just wouldnt come out, the was Bo's biggest fear but it never happened. They always had a plan, but the plan was vague, way too vague for Bo to feel comfortable. The plan was: if she wasn't out by an hour and fifteen he would go up and pound on the door real manly like with one hand, with his other hand on the switchblade in his pocket, safety off, poised to pop. But that never happened. Thank god that never happened. After that was where the plan got fuzzy, and where Bo stopped wanting to think.

After everyone got cellphones the driver was just the phone person, and there was a lot less driving. Everyone still called them the drivers. Debbie would get to the place, call, and give Bo the name of the Dude, and his address and phone number. It occurred to Bo that he had a perv directory floating around on little scraps of paper in his backpack, in his pockets. Sometimes he day dreamed about what he could do with them. Send their numbers to the police, send an anonymous phone tapping tip for the regulars. But it was still Debbie's livelihood and it got him an extra twenty now and again anyway, so what was the point. They were scuzzballs, mostly, but scuzzballs with money. He sort of felt bad for them, they were all lonely, unfulfilled, and probably oppressed and fucked up somehow, cheating on their wives, fantasizing about little girls, addicted to shit, unhappy with their lives somehow and trying to forget about it. Some of them weren't even interested in sex.

One of Debbie's regulars, Zander, would just get real coked up and paranoid and want someone else around to distract him from the shit he was hearing in his head. Debbie said Zander was some rich kid who had done so much over the years that he would get real high, to high to even want to get off, and get all happy and want to watch cartoons and jabber nonstop about his cars and his college days or he could get real low and freaked out, want to die. He was one of her favorite customers, no sex, good, free blow, and a hundred bucks an hour to babysit some rich tweaker, keep him in his happy place, and make sure all the knives and shit were hidden under the sink in the kitchen. And the great thing about that situation was, the longer she kept him high, the longer she had to stick around, and the more she got paid.

There was another guy, Tom, he just wanted his house cleaned by a naked chick. At first Debbie thought it was a game he liked to play, you know, a nice old fashioned rape-the-maidservant kind of game, Thomas Jefferson style. But it wasn't that, he would just do his thing, watch the football game, pay bills, one time he was even on the phone with his mom for a half hour, all with Debbie butt-ass naked, scrubbing the countertops, washing the tile in the shower. Sometimes he would beat off, but he would never actually watch her while he was doing it, its like he got off in the idea that there was a naked chick somewhere in his house, cleaning his grout. And he always let her finish the cleaning and paid for all of it even if he shot his load two hours before she was done. After she found Tom, she just started posting ads as a naked housecleaner and got some more no-sex jobs out of it. She hauled in the extra cash always thinking, "Why didn't I think of this before?"

One night Debbie was out on a regular call and didn't call Bo after an hour and a half. Bo started to panic. He drove over to her apartment in the Haight and rang the doorbell. Her roommate was home. Michelle knew about Debbie's other jobs, he explained what was going on. They went into Debbie's room, her laptop was closed on her bed. He felt creepy doing it but he opened it up and found her email. He knew most of her jobs were through email these days, craigslist usually. He found the email that negotiated the fees and gave out the dude's address. Christ, it was from his work email, some internet company from the sound of it, how stupid can you get?

Just as he was about to head over to the address, somewhere on Fourth in SOMA, he heard Debbie's key in the lock and she strolled in to find Bo guiltily standing in the doorway to her room. He felt like he was caught, even though the only thing he was caught doing was worrying that his friend was dead in a SOMA alley. He got angry and sad and relieved all at once. He almost started yelling at her, but then he realized he might cry too. As soon as she looked at him, she apologized.

"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. My phone. The battery died. I forgot to charge it. I'm sorry," she said. Beau could tell she was a little high, or maybe drunk, but she was genuinely sorry too.

"It's okay. I checked your email for the address. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I freaked a little. Its okay now. Fuck. Just remember to charge the batteries next time will you?" he said as he hugged her. Her neck smelled like the straight girl perfume she wore on calls, with the faint smell of tequila and man-sweat underneath. It was a sad disgusting smell and in that moment Bo's stomach sunk into pity and sadness for his for his friend and anger at the world for making it such a well paying job.

Debbie was flake, and any extra money she had went up her nose, but she wasn't a bad person, she was a sweet girl and a good friend, and if Bo had a body like Debbie's he might be doing the same thing. Bo had the feeling that if Debbie had any more money, if she didnt have to work for it, she would be dangerous to herself, and that's where Bo's caretaking instinct kicked in. As it was though, she was only an occasional cokehead and for two days a week, she was taking classes, trying to get her EMT license. There would be a pee test eventually but she didn't have to worry about that just yet, so she might as well live it up. She explained later that the biggest catch with leaving her current job was having a believable resume.

"Looking at your resume I have some questions. What did you do for that two year gap between college and now?"

"Oh, you know, hooked, slung some weed, did some butt-ass naked cleaning."

No, that wouldn't fly in the Vanguard interview. She ended up fluffing some bits, saying she was traveling through Europe part of the time, played it out like she was a regular rich kid who backpacked through Italy for six months here and there. They joked about how being a tweaked out escort in San Francisco wasn't okay but "expanding your horizons" up and down the west coast of Italy was a perfectly acceptable post graduate pursuit, even if it was really the same thing.

"Oh, you know, hooked, slung some weed, did some butt-ass naked cleaning. IN ITALY."

"Oh, that sounds fabulous! What a wonderful opportunity!"

In the next few years, they drifted apart from each other but they would still run into each other out at the bars and clubs once in a while. One Tuesday night he stopped by for an after work beer and she was there, in an otherwise pretty empty bar. There was one couple huddled at one of the tables in the corner, there was another girl at the far end of the bar reading a book. The jukebox was on its idle mode, where its quiet for ten minutes or so then all of a sudden it’ll bust out with some random song you’ve never heard.
Debbie looked absolutely haggard. Bo bought her a beer.

She was an EMT now, and clean, for the most part. She had strange shifts, so she usually looked a little weary, with that slightly confused and always tired look of someone who isn’t sure about the difference between day and night.

“What’s up? How’ve you been?”

“Thanks,” she said as she picked up the new beer and pushed the old bottle to the inside of the bar. The old one wasn’t entirely done, just warm. She had been there a while.

“Rough day?” Bo asked.

“Rough week.”

“Whats up?” she was still staring at the beer in her hand.

“You heard about that girl? Sarah. That dyke that got hit by the bus last week? A bunch of people knew her.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know her. Did you?” It seemed like just about everyone had a friend of a friend or something that knew her. She was about their age, but didn’t go out too much, was kind of domestic, lived with her girlfriend, doing that dyke nesting thing. It was in the papers all week. She was riding her bike to work one morning and she got doored. She upended over the handlebars and the force of the door threw her into the middle of the street but she was okay for a minute and started to get up. Then a city bus, the 24 across town, ran her over, killed her. If it was a cartoon it would be funny, in fact Bo was sure he’d seen almost the exact thing happen to Wile E. Coyote at some point. But this was a real person, and she fucking died so it wasn’t funny at all, but Bo still couldn’t get the cartoon image out of his head.

First it was in the papers just because of the ridiculousness of it all and because it was a city bus, which makes it a big giant hella deal, and because no one could really figure out who to blame. Do you blame the driver of the car the shoved her into the street even though she was okay? Or do you blame the bus driver that couldn’t see the person lying in the street? Then later in the week it showed up again in the papers because her partner wasn’t going to get any kind of settlement from it. It was pretty classic gay rights battle, the kind that people use to bleed the hearts of the right-wingers - with the partner who had been with her for years suddenly getting no benefits and no remorse and no respect from the powers that be. It was awful. Bo stopped reading about it halfway through the week. It felt like getting hit in the head with a big heterosexist brick every time.

Debbie was still staring down at her beer. She started to pick at the label.

“I got called to that one.”

“God.”

“There was nothing I could do. I mean we’re supposed to keep them alive as long as possible, keep them breathing, no matter how hopeless it is. If we’ve done that then we’ve done our job. But I couldn’t. There was nothing we could do. I mean it’s happened before, you get used to it I guess, or your supposed to. But usually it’s car accidents, drunk guys, old people who are on their way out. I tried to give her CPR. I was pumping her chest like your supposed to but there was just nothing left to push on. It was like Jell-o. There was nothing left to push on.”

Debbie was stone, staring at her beer, or her hands around her beer. Bo put his hand on her back. She was too stone to hug; he just kept his hand there. Maybe all the jobs she had before weren’t so different after all, saving people and not ever feeling anything. She sighed real big to snap herself out of the memory and snatched up her beer, took a big swig and sat up straighter.

“Shit. How are you?” she said, finally turning to look at him.

“Fine I guess. I guess I’m fine. Do you need anything?”

“No. I’ll be okay.” And they sat there in silence for a while staring at their beers. Over an hour later, as she took the last warm swig, she turned to him.

“Will you come home with me?” she asked. She always was direct. He wasn’t sure what she was asking him for, but he went.

In the morning he made them both breakfast. She came into the kitchen to eat, wrapped in the sheet from the night before.

“You do music stuff don’t you? Or you did right?” she said.

“Yeah. Sort of. I’m not very good. I can play a few instruments. But not very well.”

Bo had taken a lot of music classes in college, but he liked thinking about it more than he liked playing it. He had a gift for thinking about it. It was like math, and he always liked math.

She went back into the bedroom and came out with a small black case.

“Here.” She put it on the table and opened it to show him. “It’s a violin. It’s just a learner. Somebody traded it for some speed a bunch of years ago. I was gonna sell it at first or trade it, but then I got clean and I thought I’d try to learn. I’m not going to get around to that though. You will. I’d rather it be with someone who’s gonna use it. It’s been banged around a bit from moving all the time; the tuning peg needs to be reset, but that’s an easy fix if you take it to a shop.”
He took the violin.

After that, things between them went back to how they were before, idle chit chat at bars, and eventually she moved away. But Beau still has the violin.

Bo ran into one of Debbie's friends, Tiff at the Lex about a year later. He was walking home and saw Tara working the door. When he looked at the crowd inside, Tiff was there at the bar with another pretty femme. He said hi to Tara and went in to say hi to Tiff. Tiff introduced him to Sarah. Sarah was beautiful, but not in a high femme sort of way. There was some eyeliner there, but she was just wearing a tank top and jeans. She had cute shoes too. Beau was a sucker for cute shoes.

Sarah and Bo hit it off and they exchanged numbers before she left to catch BART to the East Bay. Sarah called a few days later to invite him to see a show she was in.

"What kind of show?" Bo asked.

"Just a show. You'll see." Sarah was doing her undergrad in modern dance, something that Bo usually had a less than favorable opinion of, but she was flirting now and Beau loved to be teased. She told him it was at the Cherry Bar on Sunday, Bo checked it out online to see what he was in for. It was a queer strip show. Bo loved to see naked girls but mostly, he just thanked his stars it wasn't modern dance.

He butched himself up and showed up fashionably late in his favorite tie. When he walked in he saw his friend Jodie sitting in the front row. He slid into the empty seat next to him and they whispered their hello's. After a few girls, Sarah came on in a white pleather nurses dress, complete with a little white hat with a red cross on it. And yes, fabulous shoes, white pleather boots that came to just above her knees. She writhed around on to the music, unbuttoning the dress. When she was down to her red thong and sparkling red cross pasties she went out into the audience to work the tips. She moved through everyone on the perimeter of the audience, doing tiny lap dances, cooing over them, even putting band-aids on some.

When she got to Bo he was trying to be all cool, holding his folded five dollar bill casually at his crotch, but he couldnt help the huge grin on his face. She strattled him and wrapped her arms around his neck. As he reached around and slid the five into her waistband, she leaned in close to his ear and said, "I am soo glad you made it. Find me later."

During intermission she was out working the crowd for lap dances. She was in the nurses outfit again, or half of it anyway, with a sparkly red bra on top instead of the full top. She came up to Jodie first, but she was eyeing Bo.

"Can I interest you two handsome boys in a lap dance?"

Jodie was supremly uncomfortable. He was fidgeting through the entire show and he had just been telling Bo that he would probably leave before the second half. Now he was stuttering a "No. Um. Thank you though." and shoving his hands in his pockets.

"What about you big boy?" she said as she casually touched Bo's arm. Bo was too embarrased to admit he only had a ten left. He had never had a lapdace before. Weren't they expensive? And was it disrespectful if he actually liked the girl? Jesus, how did this happen? He made a little show of pulling out his wallet.

"Um. I don't know if I can." was what finally tumbled out of his mouth as he looked down at his last ten till Tuesday. She smiled at him. He knew he was turning a little bit red.

"For you boys its a two-for-one. Ten a piece." she said as she slid her hand down to Jodie's leg and looked Bo square in the eyes. Bo looked at Jodie and he stuttered an "um, ok."

She lightly grabbed both of them by the ties and led them to one of the back rooms. She set up two chairs next to eachother as a new song started. Bo knew he was supposed to keep his hands at his sides, Jodie was just too afraid to move at all. Taking turns she ground into both of them, leaning forward to make breathy little sounds into their ears. Her hands were all over, grabbing them by the hair, stroking their bound chests. He hand went between Bo's legs just as the song ended. She realized he was packing and she grinned a little. As Jodie realized it was done, he stood up and fumbled in his pocket for the ten. She straightened up and leaned down into Bo's ear.

"I like you. You're staying right here."

Jodie was really nervous again and fidgety. He said thank you and put the ten on the table where she could see it. Then he looked at Bo and said he was going and would catch him later.

Another dancer came into the room with an older guy and drew the curtain that divided the room into two tiny booths. Bo was still sitting in his chair. Sarah moved the other chair out of the way as the next song came on. She straddled him and whispered in his ear.

"This one's a freebie."

“It says its overbooked, but we’ll see about that,” says the white woman behind the counter, with the certainty of someone who has learned not to trust computers. “Twenty eight fifty,” she says and Beau hands over two twenties from a worn wallet. The wallet was expensive once, you can tell, because the leather has stretched and softened, but the rubber coating the seams shows only the slightest of wear.

She hands him his change and an envelope. The envelope's made to look official, like the paper folds that hold airplane tickets. Inside, though, is just a printed receipt for a one-way ticket on the 3:05PM southbound Greyhound, attached by perforation to more printouts that give discounts for Greyhound services, package delivery, and round trip tickets. Beau knows that these are just desperate corporate attempts to prove that Greyhound was not just a dying mode of transport, subsidized by the government in exchange for campaign contributions and the bureaucratic comfort that comes from knowing that a private company is responsible for transporting the poor without any sticky public transportation obligation put on the state and local authorities. But in this town, it doesn’t seem outmoded at all. The Greyhound station is a bustle of activity, at least a bustle of activity for such a small town. A bustle in this town means that there are five people waiting for the 3:05 southbound on a Saturday.

The person sitting across from Beau is an elderly woman, carrying a canvas bag that reads “Aberdeen Summer Music in the Park.” She is wearing a blue dress with large white polka dots. Her legs are skinny but he notices that her back is not hunched the way his own grandmother was last summer, just before she passed away. He is reminded of how sad and terrified he was to see his tall, strong grandmother, the one who kept him safe throughout his childhood, hunched and fragile and barely able to stand. Just past the old woman is a slate grey felt notice board with white plastic departure and arrival times fixed into the shallow slots. In the plexiglass covering the board is the reflection of a young man. For a moment Beau wants to nod at the man, acknowledge their shared darkness. He stops himself as he recognizes his own high Choctaw cheekbones under mocha colored African skin. Instead he smiles at himself, and laughs at his momentary foolishness, the whites of his teeth shining like planets against the dark of the felt sky. He is a handsome man, he has grown into a handsome man and he is proud of himself for it. It has taken a long time and a good bit of money too.

The old woman in the polka dotted blue dress thinks he is smiling at her, and smiles back. Her two rows of yellow teeth jut in every direction. It occurs to Beau that each long old tooth looks like it is reaching for something, something just outside her mouth. Her top left canine making a dive for a pop fly just over the foul line, the bottom left incisor sliding into the sand for a last ditch save at beach volleyball. She has a mouth full of enameled all-star athletes, and surprisingly, none of them have retired yet.

The greyhound station has no clock. This seems strange for a place that is dependant on schedules, but really, it’s a stretch to call this a station at all. It's a small blue and off-white cinderblock cube that takes up a corner of Capital Street, just across from the park. There are six institutional metal chairs; the plastic once-red seats are pock marked by cigarette burns and cuts. The black metal legs of the chairs are reinforced with wooden slats that also hold three of them together in a bank, some approximation of theater seating, or maybe just to prevent them walking away with any straggler on their way to wait in the park. Some of the larger cuts in the seats have been taped over with black duct tape. Beau takes a moment to appreciate the one cut that has been taped over with red, and the image of the tired greyhound worker spending an extra moment to look for the red tape makes him happy. It’s the little things that make all the difference. He wonders about the point at which people stopped caring about matching the color of the tape to the color of the vinyl on the chair. He wonders what changed about the world in that moment.

According to Beau’s cellphone it is 2:55. He sits in silence, with his hard green suitcase between his knees and his backpack on his lap. He rests his head against the wall behind him, closes his eyes and smiles to himself. Only three days until he’s home again, only three days until he can see his wife's sweet familiar face again, sleep in his own bed, stop moving from town to town.

He imagines meeting her at the airport. He always wanted one of those airport welcomes that were in movies when he was growing up. The woman runs up to greet her beloved at the gate and he throws his bags down on the ground as she leaps into his arms for the perfect on-screen kiss. But Beau gets distracted from his movie greeting fantasy by the logistics of it all, it couldn’t happen that way anymore. Tearful airport greetings are a casualty of post 9-11 airport security. Reality wriggles its way into his fantasy. It occurs to him that this is why he rarely masturbates anymore, he finds himself getting wrapped up in logic. Thoughts like "I know that table would fall over if I leaned into it that way" or "the washing machine is too tall for that to work" creep into his head as his hand is trying desperately to get himself off.

He usually gives in to logic at the end. What will actually happen when his plane lands is this: He'll send a text message while his plane is taxiing in on the runway that says he's landed safely and he'll be ready to go in a half hour. She’ll text back that she's on her way and that she's excited to see him again. Then she'll drive around the airport pickup loop in circles, hopefully no more than three or four times as he waits at the baggage claim for his suitcase. They’ll both have matter-of-fact tones when he calls to report that he’s waiting outside under the Alaska Airlines terminal sign and she assures him that she’s already there and she’ll be around again in a minute or two. He’ll hear his own old tan Mercedes roll up just before he sees it. His car is a diesel running on a modified form of vegetable oil and a cause that Beau’s been committed to for years. Every other weekend he takes it out to the women-run biodiesel co-op in Berkeley for a fill up. It’s been a good solid car for the past two years—and a guilt-free one at that—up until recently. Now it needs new engine mounts. When he first got it, it merely felt like driving a giant vibrator. Any truck driver will tell you that diesels can shake pretty hard. But now the engine is no longer attached to the frame of the car. The force of six hundred pounds of gravity and shear will holds it in place under the hood. He's put off fixing it, for lack of money or concern for a car that rarely gets used living in the city anyway. It's gotten worse lately, now it’s more like driving a giant subwoofer, with a thundering engine bass that makes him nauseous after long drives.

Marcie will pull up in front of him and they’ll both get butterflies in their stomachs. It seems like years since they’ve seen each other, even though it’s only been slightly more than a week. He’ll throw his suitcase into the back seat and awkwardly fit himself into the passenger seat. She usually sits here, he'll have to slide it back a little to accommodate his longer legs. That’s when they’ll kiss, still the movie star kiss, but not as dramatic with both of them seated separately in a thundering old car, her foot holding on the brake pedal. They’ll start to kiss for longer, hands through each other’s hair, and then get shooed away by a middle-aged airport security guard. “No Parking! Keep it moving! One minute limit!” he’ll shout, and maybe bang on the window for effect, proud of his fleeting authority while covertly stealing glances at the happy couple, bitterly reminded of how his wife left him almost five years ago today and how these days he falls asleep alone in front of the TV.

There is a part of Beau’s fantasy brain too that knows the reaction would be different if the roles were reversed, if it was him picking Marcie up from the airport, if it was him, a muscular dark man, driving up to the airport terminal and driving off with that beautiful fair and delicate looking redhead. The suspicious eyes of the security guard guiltily would dart away as she happily leans over and kisses him.

“They’re gonna think I kidnapped you” he would joke when they first met and he would pick her up from her job at the school in his thunderous old car.

“I hope you have a better getaway car Mr. Big Black Kidnapper, cause this sure as hell ain’t gonna get you past state lines,” she would say as her hand reached over his, resting comfortably on the worn leather of the automatic shift knob.

Now though it was less of a joke and more of just the way things were, not even worth a joke anymore. In two years of being together they had just grown accustomed to it. Beau preferred to fade into the background, or just ignore it when they were confronted with awkward stares. Between the two of them they called it the where’d-you-get-that-white-girl look. Marcie didn’t like staying in the background though. Given any opportunity, she would bring up the fact that people shouldn’t think she was being kidnapped just because she was with a wonderful strong black man, that they were equally one quarter Choctaw, that just because their were more rape-babies in her family tree didn’t mean they were all that much different. That phrase, “rape-babies” always made Beau cringe and slink further into the background. It usually had the same effect on whoever was glaring as well, which is exactly what Marcie was going for.

He didn’t mind it so much; he knew it was something that was acceptable for her to say that would have been completely unacceptable coming out of his mouth, especially now that he was growing into his masculinity so well. There was a time when a comment like that would have just gotten him written off as an uppity negro woman, but that seems like ages ago. With a more full transition now, he had lost certain privileges; jokes about rape were one of them, though he was never the sort to make those jokes in the first place.

Beau started transitioning four years ago, when he was twenty-five. Now the once terrifying monthly shots of testosterone were old hat. One month in his left upper arm, the next month in his right thigh, then left ass cheek and so on. It was good to alternate so you weren't stabbing the same spot six months in a row. Some of the guys he knew still hated the needles even though they had been doing it just as long as he had. Beau always liked them, he liked to watch the hard metal slide into his soft flesh, and the oily liquid magically disappear into his body. About twelve hours afterwards, it was a little sore but the amount of superhuman energy he felt made him forget about that.

At first the bursts of energy scared him. His heart would start beating fast, too fast, it seemed. It felt like his whole body was vibrating, like he'd had too much coffee and sugar and not enough food. He learned not to drink coffee on the after-shot days, it made him feel crazy, or like he was going to die or explode. It also made him want to fuck everything in sight, and do it very quickly; attach himself to the first female leg he found and ride it for all it was worth. Things have leveled off through the years, his body has acclimated to the changes, or maybe his brain has done the acclimating. There is still that superhuman day-after boost though. Everything is more acute; heavy things are lighter, muscles seem bigger, and even mild anger becomes a kind of rushing volcano of rage.

Women are more attractive on those day-after-shot days, but what surprised Beau was that even men became sex objects. Beau never really noticed men much before transitioning; he had what seemed a standard queer realization process in high school. He had dated some boys. They were nice boys, attractive boys, but he just hated being the girl all the time. He looked a lot different then; he was a pretty girl, though he wasn't very interested in being pretty. As soon as he started to transition, even when he was just thinking about it, investigating his options, men suddenly came into view. He would be out at bars and find himself staring at pecs and crotches. He'd wonder if they used to be women, like him, he started to realize that it didn't matter all that much.

His raging feminism subsided into a much more mild acceptance of people as people. Problems that he chalked up to "stupid men" before became problems of just people not being the best kind of people they could be. Once gender was skewed, even race became blurry sometimes. He would see the howling black men on the streets, with a "hey momma" for every black woman that walked by. Now even they became less a product of an oppressed culture in a whitey-white-white-world and more of just people not being decent to other people, simple as that. If he could be a good respectful black man, so could they.

Still, even as a good respectful black man, the urge to hump like wild beast every time a nice rack walked by was undeniable. He had never imagined that all the differences between men and women were owned singly to two readily synthesized hormones. He understood the physical changes, his facial hair, his voice deepening, his chin squaring a bit, even his clit magically turning into something slightly larger and more penis-like. It was easy to picture those kinds of transformations right from the beginning. Even before he started the shots he had a good idea of what he would look like. He would look like a darker version of his grandpa, even as a butch woman the resemblance was noticeable, as a man it would be undeniable. In his head it all looked like a slow motion animation of his face and body slowly melting into that photo of his young grandfather on his wedding day in 1929. What he didn't expect were the thought changes, the perception changes. One of Beau's favorite books growing up was a conceptual math book, it explained the story of a two dimensional triangle. The triangle lives its happy little life as a triangle, on a flat plane, until one day a sphere shows up and tries to explain the concept of depth. The sphere brings the triangle into the third dimension and shows him what it means to be a pyramid or a cube. Showing was the only way of explaining something that the two dimensional triangle could not possibly imagine. After a few months on hormones Beau felt like that triangle. Things were different. That isn't to say things were better, that somehow he was smarter or that he lost his ability to cook or clean or read maps or anything. Things were just different, in a multidimensional sort of way.

Women, even the butch women at the dyke bars, or the tranny boys who hadn't started transitioning yet, looked so much softer and more, well, feminine. They looked like these delicate porcelain dolls, or smooth hairless children in comparison to what Beau was starting to see in the mirror every day. Beau started to realize that his perception of people was always, and had always been, in relation to himself. He would think back to how he looked only a handful of months before and realize how different he looked. As much as he tried, as much as he bound his chest and shaved his face and made his voice as gravelly as it could be he would still get a "Thank you ma'am" from the grocery checkout lady or the restaurant waiter. Back then it just made him angry and confused, but now, now he understood.

About a year into transition, he began loosing his gaydar with women. All of them, no matter how butch and tough-as-nails they looked, they all still looked like women to him, and punk straight women and butch dykes were never really all that far apart to begin with. He even understood why even only a year before, men would still inexplicably hit on him, buy him drinks. He looked like a tough woman, but a woman all the same. Back then he thought they were just stupid, now he could see they were just seeing the world through the eyes of men, and unlike him, they had never seen it any other way.

Interacting socially with people born female became all about two things: reading the reactions to his presence and studying the lines of the undergarments that he could see through their shirts. Straight women and femmes wore bras, with small colored straps and breasts that were clearly to the left and right. The straight women paid attention to him, reacted to whatever he was saying as if they were interested, even if he knew they weren't. If they were interested in him sexually sometimes they even touched his arm or leg to accentuate conversational points. The femmes ignored him completely and tried to pretend he was invisible. And to him it seemed like maybe he was invisible to them. The butches wore sports bras or old colorless bras under baggy clothing; their breasts looked like they were being squished much closer together, but still formed a shelf above their stomachs. If they didn't ignore him, they patted him hard on the shoulder and shook his hand.

The pre-op and pre-T trannyboys had their compression shirts or extremely tight sportsbras, the straps were wider, more like a tank top, and almost always white, with at least one, if not two or three more shirts over that. Their breasts, if they were visible at all, were low and out to the sides, and flattened, sometimes very painfully, and sometimes very convincingly. Beau was never all that convincing. Now even they ignored him a lot of the time, unless they knew him from the community, getting word about his transness from friends of friends, or seeing him out at trans events. They shook his hand as hard as they could, sometimes they gave him the once over, searching for tips, or just checking him out as one of their own, imagining his naked masculine body, just as he did in the beginning, when suddenly men came into view. But to Beau most of these people looked about the same now. They looked like women, and they looked different than what he saw in the mirror every morning.

A few days after his homecoming, Beau was at the laundromat folding Marcie's laundry. He felt strange, he felt like a giant hulking child molester. It was just laundry, but it was all of her small, child-sized things in his big brown hands. He was trying to be delicate, but his hands seemed so massive. Its not like he had never done laundry before, its not even like he had never done his girlfriend’s laundry before, but this felt different, this just felt dirty somehow.

Before he left on the trip he tidied his room, done a load of their laundry, and then he had done his suitcase full of laundry at Beth's house right before he left for home. For possibly the first time the only washing to be done was Marcie's. School started for her today, and there was literally nothing for him to be doing, so he decided to surprise her with clean laundry and dinner after her first day back on a full schedule of work and school. Besides, there was the matter of the bed sheets that they had run out of.

In the past few months having clean sheets to sleep on every night had become and ongoing battle. They had discovered things about themselves and about each other. Beau knew it since he had been dating Florence, it just hadn't happened in a while. It had been a while since he was this comfortable with anyone, and this comfortable in his own body. What they discovered about each other in the past few months was how to make each other come. Not just your run-of-the-mill-big-O coming, they had both been doing that since childhood, and since the second date with each other, instead now it was almost always this explosive-female-ejaculation coming. Coming over everything—viscous clear liquid spilling out of both of them, soaking the sheets, flooding the mattress. Sometimes they tried to switch to the floor, but that just made the carpet squishy under them, and Christ knows how they were going to get that out of the carpet. They had tried the shower, but the hot water only lasted for so long and usually whatever got started in the shower only ended up in the bed later anyway. They tried to protect the sheets with old towels. The towels didn’t do much but soak through to the sheets anyway, but at least sometimes they made it so they could sleep on the slightly damp sheets for the night instead of throwing them directly into the laundry. Twice they just had to flip the mattress over.

No one ever talks about this. Is it possible that so few people have sex this good that this becomes a problem? The first time it happened to Beau was at least six years ago, Florence asked him if he peed when he came. "I don't know. I don't think so. That’s not what it felt like anyway. It just felt... good. Really, really good." They sniffed at it. It didn't smell like pee, and it was clear. Then they got on the internet. The almighty internet explained that it was indeed possible, and that no, it wasn't pee, it was good sex. Sex so good in fact that no one they knew ever even talked about it like it was real.

The porn was what convinced them in the end though. They discovered that this was a popular thing in porn, with entire websites devoted to it, something they never even considered. Some of it looked faked, it was porn after all, but there were home movies they found too. The one Beau always remembered was of a fairly average looking woman, maybe in her twenties. It was very intimate but not entirely sexual, you get the feeling that she wants to prove that she can do it, to a girl friend maybe. Her boyfriend is holding the camera and she is naked and showing off, she's holding a vibrator on her clit, but he's not even touching her, just talking, warm encouraging words, things like "I love you baby, I love how turned on you get." and "You're so beautiful when you do that." She whispers that she wants him to touch her and his finger enters the screen. He barely touches her labia as she laughs and giggles and comes all over his hand and even splashes onto the camera. She is so happy about it and just keeps coming. That was the one that convinced Beau, but even then it didn't happen very often.

Beau and Marcie went to Target together and got one of those waterproof, stain proof undersheets from the kids department. They only had them in single and full, so it only fit Beau's bed. Then they ordered a queen size one on the internet for Marcie's bed so they were going to get that one in six to eight weeks, probably six to four weeks now. Either way, the undersheet things were just that, undersheets. They were sticky and strange to sleep on and sex for them was blissfully spontaneous, or possibly just still blissfully omnipresent. So now there was the changing of the sheets, which seemed to be a semi daily ritual for them. They were going to need more quarters if things kept up this way.

The only other things in this load of laundry besides the sheets from the past two days were Marcie's tiny clothes and her tiny underwear. He would try to flip the long sleeves right-side out by pushing his arm through them and pulling from the end like he usually did to his own, but his big clumsy forearms barely fit through the tiny openings. He felt like he was folding a child’s clothes, he felt like people were looking at him funny, a big dark man with only tiny baby doll clothes to wash. It was the where'd-you-get-that-white-girl look without Marcie even being there. It was the where'd-you-get-that-white-girls-dirty-underwear look, in front of a dryer full of her size five underwear and dirty bed sheets. He tried to remind himself that they were both adults and married even, at least in the eyes of most states, but he still felt creepy as fuck.

They played with that dynamic sometimes, it seemed like Marcie liked being smaller. She reveled in the fact that such a big gentle man could flip her over and push her down. She was powerful too, though and he liked that she could hold her own against him. After his homecoming they both had bruises.

Marcie was tired and moody. Even after two years together there were still things she wouldn't share outright. Beau knew that eventually she would break. Not break so much as spill the beans. They functioned the same way on that level. Neither were very emotional, both growing up in households where emotion meant weakness. They were both incredibly self aware as far as that was concerned, tried to check themselves and eachother, gently, on familial patterns. The way it happened most of the time was that things would seem off, on some level, and a day or two later the thing would come out, whatever it was, in a calm and fully thought out discussion.

Mostly it had to do with externals, an annoying situation at work, or something disturbing in the news. They still hadn't had any big issues with eachother, and when things seemed off Beau's well instilled fatalism always took hold.

Thoughts like "What did I do wrong?" and "How did I fuck up?" would chase eachother in an endless round robin, until finally he just went to his bedroom and fell asleep. It wasn't because he thought he was a bad person, or a shitty partner, it was just that enough people had told him the answers to those questions by now that he just started anticipating them.

Usually the next day Marcie would mention that she wanted to talk later, after dinner, after she ran errands, try to give both of them fair warning. But Beau's stomach would drop into his shoes and he'd take her hand and pull her over to the couch and say that he'd be distracted and stressed about it unless she gave him some clue. Clues turned into the discussion then and they would both realize that whatever was such a big deal in their solitary, was a much lighter burden when it was shared.

The last time it was Marcie's falling grades combined with a call from her high school friend Tom. Tom made an offhand remark about running into Jason, Marcie's high school sweetheart. It had been years since Marcie and Jason had even talked, they lived states away and even though they dated for three years and it ended fairly well - as post-high school breakups go, anyway - they were never the best of buddies afterward. Tom mentioned that Jason's mother died a few months ago.

The news about Jason's mother came on the same day as her mid semester grade reports came back, and her financial aid would be cut if she didn't shape up. For two days she silent about it, but she was moody, and her usually cynical humor turned harsh and biting, especially where Beau was concerned. Its easier to flush out emotions on someone you know will forgive you. You only hurt the ones you love. She told him she wanted to sleep alone in her room and reassured him that it didn't have anything to do with him, she just needed space.

Beau fell into the usual cycle of self doubt, running through his actions and reactions to every small event that occured in the last week, looking for fault. He would apologize for everything; not asking how her day went on Tuesday, jumping into the middle of a story she told on Wednesday, eating the last of the Ben and Jerry's on Friday. He was always so sure he fucked things up.

Beau was damaged, he had been damaged since before he could remember. Childhood was rough, he had cigarette burn scars on his little arms by two and was sucking his uncles cock by seven. At nine he learned how to cover up bruises the shape of handprints on his arms and legs, and by ten had lost his virginity to his mothers boyfriend. At twelve he could tell if a gun was loaded by looking down the barrel. But all that was just damage. He was safe from all that now and remarkably well adjusted in spite of it all, thanks to years of therapy and a chosen family of caring friends and lovers. Now the most that came up was the crushing need for approval, some adult equivalent of a gold star next to his name or a simple verbal stamp that said "Great job!"

When Beau was in that head space, Marcie's I'm laughing-with-you cynicism cut to the core. It stopped being funny and started being blanket disapproval. Tonight he was in the living room, checking email and listening to Cat Power when Marcie walked in and said "What the hell is this shit? It sounds like it was recorded in an empty bathroom stall. And why is she screaming like that?"

They knew music was something they didn't agree on all the time, and truth is, "You Are Free" actually did sort of sound like it was recorded in an empty bathroom stall with all the layering and reverb and crap, but Beau liked it that way. Most days her comment would have been a little less biting, and would have resulted in a few days worth of jokes about screaming emo lyrics in empty bathroom stalls. Today though, the feeling of disapproval was acute, and Beau found himself on the verge of tears.

"At least its not a hair band," he said, as he lowered it and she went back to reading in her room. What he was wanting to say was "At least its not that crap you listen to," but held his tongue.

He could be biting too, but he knew he was being oversensitive, and that he was being oversensitive because she was being moody. And she was probably being moody for some reasone that didn't have anything to do with him. He had the sneaking suspicion that whatever was there under the surface would come out soon. He knew she would tell him when she was ready. He knew she was stressed from being back at school, and her work schedule hadn't changed to accomodate it yet so between the two she had put in a few twleve hour days. And he knew he was keeping her up at night too, though that wasn't entirly his fault, they were still in that happy to be home phase and there was a whole new pile of dirty sheets to be washed.

Still he could tell there was something over and above that and he just had to wait for it. Beau was a patient man.

Marcie's schedule had become Beau's schedule. Where she worked and went to school, he slept and cooked and ate and watched TV. He didn't even like TV. The only reason they had one to begin with was because of their other housemate, Jerry. Jerry was Marcie's friend from freshman year at school and the only reason they could afford to have seperate bedrooms in a decent apartment. It's rent controlled and Jerry had the place for five years now, grandfathered from the housemate before him. Both Marcie and Beau believed that seperate bedrooms in a decent apartment was key to a healthy relationship, but San Francisco didn't afford that type of luxury to most. You can be sure that if there was any way around it they wouldn't be living with Jerry.

First of all, Jerry was a dude. Jerry liked baseball and watching movies with mobsters. Jerry liked smoking weed and eating pop tarts and watching cartoons. Jerry was a dude. Jerry was a talkative dude, and, bizarrly counter to his dude-ness, Jerry was an emotional dude. Jerry also liked his antidepressants. When he found out that Beau got fired from his job he actually started crying.

"What are you going to do? How could they do this to you?" he teared up and started snivelling, not because he was worried about the rent, he didn't usually worry about silly things like that, but because he was hurt and insulted for his friend. And possibly because he needed his Zoloft script refilled. The reaction was as touching as it was strange and uncomfortable.

He wasn't gay either, wasn't even a tranny. He was an honest to goodness white dude in touch with his feelings, or just too neurotic to hold them inside like everyone else. In fact in that department Beau and Marcie were much more dude-like. Beau hardly batted an eyelash when they told him his "position had been terminated" though he was raging inside. It was a new manager, Krissy, that had been over him for a grand total of five days. He knew it was coming as soon as the annoucement was made about her new position at the last company meeting.

When she was first hired, six months after him, he googled her. Her last name was fairly odd, Meitel, so he was pretty sure it was her, or at least a relative who came up on the alt.religion.christian.presbyterian boards. It was from 1995, the height of the alt forums and before google increased or decreased your job prospects, but it was still ominous. There was only one message, a reponse to some flame about the Trinity that Beau didn't entirly understand:

"You 'showed' nothing, Steve. Since you believe you did, it only serves to demonstrate that you do not rightly divide the scriptures, but cut and paste portions of it which you believe agree with your carnal behavior while rejecting other scriptures which expose you for the false teacher and wicked man that you are. Thus, you wrest the scriptures to your own destruction.

Nevertheless, by your own logic, you are a daughter of Sabellius the Romanist priest.

What you sow you reap. God is not mocked by you Steve."

There was that, along with several alternatingly self depricating and know-it-all messages on alt.support.diet. They went from "I'm pear shaped and I hate myself" to cosmo magazine guided nutritional information about how saturated and unsaturated fat is the same thing and you should really only eat celery and diet cola for the rest of your life. There were also about three thousand posts in the alt.disneyworld forums. The alt.diet posts were just sad, and her Krissy's apparent love of everything Disneyworld just made it all an even sadder existance in the jaded eyes of Beau and Marcie, but they had a field day with that one alt.religion post. For weeks the response to anything was "God is not mocked by you, Steve."

"Those pants make your butt look awesome, baby."
"God is not mocked by you, Steve."

"I know you love it when I steal food off of your plate."
"God is not mocked by you, Steve."

And so it went, until Krissy was promoted. Then the jokes stopped. Beau had no doubt Krissy had Googled him too. For a long time he was careful about what went on the net with his name attached. He was thankful nothing of his angsty high school years made its way into the archive, but now that he was grown, he didn't bother hiding anything anymore. He was way beyond flame wars so he wasnt saying anything stupid, but he was all over the internet. He was happy to give honest advice in the FTM community resources, queer people of color boards, anarchist action, the biodiesel forum. You could even find plenty of swarthy pictures from his drag king days, if you were smart enough to make that pre transition connection. His name had stayed almost the same - from Belinda (Bo for short) to Beau - so it wasn't that difficult of a jump to make.

What google said about him was that he was someone smart and talented and queerer than a three dollar bill, and that was fine with Beau. By not hiding anything, he felt that he quietly insisted that his existance was normal and respectable and good and he stuck to that. Sticking to that however was not going to help him in the face of a seriously conservative christian - even if she was quiet about it - manager. She never said anything that would make it clear where her decisions were coming from, but Beau could feel it. It was almost an audible change once she figured out what his deal was.

When he was first hired, everyone at work just thought he was gay. There was one fag who worked there, or at least one out fag. His name was Simon. He looked average enough, but a pink flowered purse practically fell out of his mouth everytime he spoke. After that he latched onto Beau like a life preserver. He wasn't creepy or hitting on him, just happy to fianlly have work buddy. He would wander over to Beau's desk on the way from the bathroom and talk about going out to dinner with his boyfriend, about training for the AIDS ride. Mostly though he talked about his pet turtle, Snappers who was rescued from disused terarrium in an abandoned apartment.

When Beau brought Marcie to some work functions, everyone but Simon seemed confused but sort of relieved. Simon figured it out pretty quickly after that. It was San Francisco after all and he knew they were still in the same club in some way. Thats when Krissy started acting different. Maybe she could tell something was queer, maybe thats when she googled him. Beau got the feeling that gay men were fine in her book as long as they were the Will and Grace kind of gay like Simon and didn't wander too far from the Castro. And black men were fine as long as they sounded and acted "white" enough. But bisexuals were a different story, and married bisexuals were an abomination. And married, kinky, biracial, bisexual trannies were so far away from God's plan that Beau might as well be the devil himself sitting in the next cubicle over.

After that Krissy kept to herself, didn't chat with him and only sent the most cursory of emails about projects they needed to work on together. Even after he was fired there was absolutly no evidence that it had anything to do with his color or orientation. But it was, he was as sure of that as the queer nose on his black face. The only thing that would stand up in any court would be the statistics that showed that in a company of two hundred people there was only one other black person - Cheri who worked in accounting and was the wife of one of the GM's, and one other queer person, Simon. Even that idea had holes in it. There was a Tokyo office, so if we were counting an entire Japanese annex as "people of color" - and oh how Beau hated that term - there was an entire office full of them.

So he tried to forget about it and decided to let the unemployment roll in for a few months and take some time to think. The problem was that he wasn't thinking at all. He was trying his hardest to do anything but think. He woke up late, hours after Marcie left for school or work. He made himself breakfast and sat in the living room and watched whatever Jerry was watching. Except whenever Jerry was watching something, he wasn't actually watching it, and he wouldn't let anyone else watch it either. What Jerry did instead was take cues from the sitcoms, or the cartoons, or even the commercials to tell Beau his life stories, whether or not they vaguely had to do with something that just flittered across the screen.

Beau learned all about Jerry's college application process because Brian, the dog on the Family Guy was trying to finish college. Beau heard about Jerry's short career working in a restaurant because of seeing Spongebob Squarepants at work at the Krusty Krab. Then Beau heard all about how Jerry met B.B. King at a jazz festival in New Mexico because some old black man was playing guitar on a TGIFridays commercial. When Jerry started talking about the Red Sox game he went to when he was sixteen, Beau couldn't even pretend anymore. He quietly got up and went into Marcie's room to look for a book he could read. Beau wasn't used to TV, and Beau wasn't used to having to feign interest in this many non-very-interesting life stories and the two going on at once was too much for him even when he was looking for distraction. Jerry wasn't insulted by Beau walking out on him, it happened all the time.

Eventually, Jerry got to be too much. Beau secluded himself in his room all day, occasionally making it out only if he heard the security gate slam behind him on his way out. Jerry worked on film crews so his schedule was completly erratic. Some days he'd wake up and stumble out at four in the morning for an early morning shoot, sometimes he'd crawl into bed at 9:00am exhausted from an all night job. It never occured to Beau that filmakers actually used the sun to light any of their work until they started living with Jerry. Of course they would have to, he just never thought of it. Now he found himself looking at the shadows cast in movies' outdoor scenes, checking for inconsistancies.

Jerry's constant need for attention was draining for both of them. As soon as Marcie came home he would find some reason to wander to wherever she was.

"Do you have a three-hole punch?"

"I don't think so, try Beau."

Beau was completly unsurprised by the knock on his door. Usually it wasn't even that coded. Usually he just launched right into his trial-of-the-day. The director hates him, he fucked up three hours of footage, his brother called drunk and angry last night. It was always something that was threatening to send him into a self-hating rage or a whimpering ball of self pity. Beau could usually play the stoic, unemotional male role and just walk away from whatever his schpeil was but Marcie was much more forgiving.

Marcie and Beau were both good at taking care of people and they started to realize that this may have been the roommate attraction when he gave them first choice for the place. These days taking care of each other was enough of a job, with Marcie's grueling work-school schedule and Beau's mildly depressed unemployment. Jerry was sucking all the leftover energy away. They needed to sit him down and have a talk.

Before the talk could happen Marcie mentioned her Jerry-sucking-the-life-out-of-her problem to her friend at school, Carol. Carol relayed that to her friend Helen, who then told her boyfriend Thom. Thom worked with Jerry on some film editing he was doing at the University. News got back around to Jerry in a very high school telephone kind of way. Beau pictured the Telephone Hour number from Bye Bye Birdie in his head, starting with Carol and Helen in a split screen on bright red and pink backgrounds.

"Hi, Helen!"

"Hi, Carol!"

"What's the story, morning glory?"

"What's the word, humming bird?"

"Have you heard about Marcie and Jerry?"

"Did she really get pissed?"

"Did he whimper and cry?"

Their pigtails are swaying in too fast tempo, holding color coordinated rotary phones in their hands and wearing contrasting polyester jumpsuits from 1958. The funniest part was that when the split screen got to Thom, his liberal-arty-socks-with-sandals man-ponytail was in a bow too, swaying in time. Beau could get carried away with the visualizations.

By the time Marcie actually sat Jerry down to talk to him, he already knew what was going on. He was open to it, he knew how high maintenence he was, he even stopped himself from crying, though he was close. Marcie was clear, Beau came in to the living room halfway through, she was telling him that both Beau and Marcie needed to know that they could let him know they weren't interested in talking at anytime, they needed to know that it wouldn't make him burst into tears and need to be cared for even more. They needed him to know that even though they were all friends, they were not therapists and they needed their own space, and if the doors to either of their rooms were closed it meant they were taking that space. The way she worded everything so carefully made Beau love Marcie even more. She was unwavering but caring, honest and firm.

After that Jerry kept more to himself, he stayed in his room alot, stoned with some video games. Jerry went to St. Louis on a shoot for a week. The calm in the house was audible. Beau and Marcie hadn't realize how much stress they were both carrying from all of Jerry's problems until he was gone. Thats when they started talking about moving.

At first it was to find a way to take over the lease that Jerry was on, but that was mostly a daydream, since they knew he would never agree to that, and it felt too unfair to both of them anyway. Then came finding another house with roommates. They both talked about how much they dreaded the personality conflicts and the battles over dishes and bills. They exchanged horror stories. Marcie had the guy who grew weed in the first floor street facing windows "to advertise" - except, duh, he was advertising to the police too. She nearly lost everything to the feds. Beau had the guy everyone just called "couchdude." He slept on the couch, most days he was on speed and watching the static on the TV, but on some sadder days he was, what he called Dymo-trippin' - trying to get wasted by drinking as much Dimotap as he could steal from the Walgreens on Twenty-fourth and Mission. This went on for over six months before any of the fifteen people actually paying rent at the co-op realized that he wasn't officially anyone's "guest." Everyone knew him, but no one claimed him. Even after he got kicked out he'd sometimes stumble back to the house anyway. A few months later he showed up blazingly drunk and bloody from being kicked out of a bar, his nose was broken and he bled all over the porch. The bloody handprints stayed on the white steps for a few days before anyone gave in and cleaned them up. There were lesser evils too, a month after Beau and Marcie met, Beau got kicked out of his nice upscale rent-controlled apartment because they were making too many happy sex noises and the master tenant downstairs had just broken up with her boyfriend. Even after that, they kept trying to find seperate places with roommates who werent psycho. Impossible times two.

It hard enough to find a few friends that arent nutjobs or tweakers in San Francisco, let alone people you might want to live with. All that coupled with finding an affordable room with more than ten square feet to move around in makes for a pretty tall order. Oh, and pets, Beau had a cat, Stella, that was the bane of his apartment hunting existance. What they wanted was a place to themselves. Still the thought of finding a place of their own together was terrifying. As it was they didn't socialize a whole lot lately, mostly because of Marcie's schedule and Beau's getting-sadder-by-the-minute bank account. If they lived with only eachother that would be the end of it altogether. They were afraid they would only socialize with each other, each growing to hate the other because of simple overexposure.

Maybe not though, maybe it would be more freeing to know that they could choose to socialize with whoever they wanted, instead of having all their social energy being expended on roommate dynamics. They were adults right? They could figure it out as they went along and still manage to not hate each other in the end. Still, Beau was scared shitless about it. And even though Marcie would never admit it, she was too.

Marcie loved him in a tie. Beau always felt that rich white men were the only people who felt comfortable wearing a noose around their own neck voluntarily for a good reason – because they had never been the ones with the real nooses around their necks. Once Beau started to transition, he noticed that most men, at least men of his age and place in society, didn’t actually wear ties unless they were at weddings, funerals, or job interviews. And at the types of places he worked, liberal non-profits or software companies, even wearing a tie for an interview was negotiable. He noticed that when he wore ties, he didn’t pass as a man, instead he passed as a dyke, trying to be a man. It seemed funny, like some kind of cultural joke – that the thing that was supposed to be some big sign of masculinity was actually the thing that gave him away as no masculine enough.

And so he didn’t wear ties until he met Marcie. By the time they met though, Beau was far enough into his transition that it didn’t matter much. Now, he looked like an overdressed man, or a quirkily dressed emo boy in a tie. Marcie always explained that the other boys she had dated never wore ties, they hated them, they barely even wore shirts with collars. It occurred to him that if he were raised as a boy he would have probably rebelled in that way too. He imagined himself as a dusty playful little boy being stuffed into a shirt and tie for church on Sundays, the way he saw his cousins growing up. As it was he was doing his own rebelling, refusing to wear a dress after the age of seven.

He was wearing a tie out tonight for her. They were meeting out at the Lexington for a drink, her friend Allie was working at the door and it was dollar drink Monday. She had Tuesdays off this semester so they didn’t have to worry about going to bed in time for her eight AM alarm.

By the time he got there she was slurring a little. It was cute; it was cute only because it wasn’t a usual occurrence. Aysha was working, and Aysha liked her, they had some kind of sassy femme camaraderie going on between them. Between Aysha being liberal with her shot counts, Allie’s extra drink tickets, and Marcie’s low tolerance and empty stomach she was pretty well snookered in under an hour. When Beau walked in Marcie grabbed him by the tie and kissed him hard. Beau just smiled.
“Hi baby. Good to see you too.”

Beau had a few drinks too but after dating Monica a few years ago he always felt like he should be the sober one, the one who can take care of them in case anything happened.