This quebecois chick with the Grinch finger dreadlocks who called me Caitlyn Jenner backstage claims Metis now. I’ve just finished reading Jake Arrowtop’s chapbook of “unsacred” poetry, Rez Void, which you can order from Bottlecap Press, if you wanna ache like I ache. You can always tell when I’m homesick because my whole apartment starts to smell like thick-cut bacon, spam, and “hiraeth” is one of those words I keep forgetting because it’s more accurate to clumsily stammer my way through this feeling.
Wanting to go home but home doesn’t want you, not really. Home never wanted you. Home was a man who loved you more than anything in the entire world and now he’s dead, his house belongs to some distant cousins of yours who definitely wouldn’t believe you if you said you were related, because since when? Home is a series of memories plus that painting your old best friend did of the man back when he lived here, in Maryland, and home is you trying to retrace his steps like some private detective in a comic, as if echoing his life will bring him back to you.
Coherence is impossible for me to achieve, so I find myself jealous and suspicious of famous Indians whose stories cohere. I know that’s really crabby of me. I also know my pushback against the word “Indigenous” being transformed into some kind of virtuous identity is equal parts warranted and nitpicking, yet another facet of the negative energy I expel from time to time. I wanna be careful, though. I don’t want my Nativeness to be some badge of impunity, make me a god among men, a sage among fools. I’m cooking bacon in my underwear and letting the grease pop my thighs because I miss when we fed the asshole across the street’s starved-out fighting dog. On instinct, I’m pouring all my leftovers in one bowl, like my papa did, only Spike–that’s what we called him, Spike–has probably been dead for almost twenty years now.
The asshole named all his kids after himself. All of them. Even the girl. Before that SWAT team came and took him away, she found out a terrible truth about her father, and I had no idea how to comfort her. We were maybe five or six years old. Probably six, because the Bad Thing had already happened to me, and seeing her cry like that made me uncomfortable. I pulled up all the dry grass in our vast backyard and let it rain down over her head like an itchy baptism while she scowled at me. She had her face buried in the dirt so I joined her. That was the best I could do. The best I can do.
Anyways, I forgot that one Maybe-tis girl’s name. She’d been platinum blonde when we met and talked like Hannah Horvath, but post-pandemic I’ve been informed she has this weird lilting singsong rez voice now. I wonder about the purpose of “Indigeneity” if claiming it means fame but living it means whatever this is. I love the man I’m seeing right now so much because he tells me outright when he’s “cranky” or “grumpy” and puts himself in containment. I’ve started to do that. And I wonder about why GoFundMe campaigns always skyrocket when the person’s got skeletons in their closet but barely break a thousand when it’s someone who actually needs it. I gotta be careful with that, too. Like I don’t wanna moralize poverty and who deserves what.
A guy who may or may not have sexually assaulted me, once upon a time, taught me how to make what he called “Hollywood eggs.” I cut out a little rectangle from the center of my Aldi’s brand gluten free white bread. Then I eat the rectangle even though you’re not supposed to do that, because fuck him. I was too drunk to remember which way it went. I’d been one of those girls who shot whiskey and twirled bourbon like I was some grizzled old white man. I ease the oversized egg into the hole and wince as gravity pulls some of the egg white from its cradle. It bleeds across the flesh-speckled pan and I remember how, the morning after, I poured all of my apple cider vinegar into our claw foot tub so I could burn whatever he’d given to me out of my body. I’m getting deja vu recalling this, maybe I’ve already told you this story. Forgive me. They’re really good eggs when you cook them right.
Growing up, our mother always called Walmart “the Evil Empire” and told us never to shop there. Yesterday, I bought a gold plated spatula from the West Baltimore Walmart and a matching gold-rimmed baking pan, one of those stoneware pieces that probably has more carcinogens than we have names for. While my friends helped me put all my groceries and new cookware away, I paused, regarding my other golden things with a haughty stare.
“Good lord,” I said, “I’m so tacky.”
I flip my Hollywood egg with my brand new golden spatula and wince again as the yolk slips free. Vulgar as ever, I clench, like doing ten kegels in a row will magically suck my food back into place. I tilt my head and realize with a soft, “huh,” that it actually has, and somehow the egg’s still intact.
Around the time I was maybe assaulted, maybe not, one of my friends asked me to explain a cleansing ceremony on camera. After a few takes, they shook their head, beyond patient with me, and asked why I was so confident off camera but all “ums” and “uhs” and “well, like,” on. We never did get a good take, which is probably for the best, since you’re not supposed to film ceremony.
We spent summers in Browning, Montana, but they’re not our people. I’m enrolled White Earth Ojibwe, but I’ve barely been there. Today I called Hayward High School and realized the only voice I recognized was Craig Olson’s, on the answering machine, telling me to dial my party’s extension now. Sometimes I wonder if I’m still in high school, all of my seventeen years poured into a five-foot-ten frame and crumpled in those cramped formica desks, my eyes on the clock, my breasts mottled with gooseflesh as I push them up into the sizzling fluorescent light. While committing to the process of returning to school, this time in pursuit of a law degree, I’ve held my 2.555 GPA in my two hands and Googled “555 angel number,” as if that’ll make it look any better to the admissions office when it inevitably comes across their desks that I somehow ended both my prior school careers this way. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Slinking off into the shadows like the amputated snake fled the ruins of Eden.
I had been a bad student because I had bad dreams, dreams of social, economic, environmental collapse. Dreams of fascism. Wendigo dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up grasping at my own throat, which clicked and whirred and ground itself together like there were teeth all the way down. I thought, why should I make an effort if it’s all already over? If we’re already dead? But as the future breathed down the neck of the past, as the present unfolded in a miasma of burnt bridges and sudden selfhood, I realized I needed to be someone, do something.
So I became an actor. A model. A writer. I never fully committed to any of those labels, I mostly dabbled. You know me, some of you, you might have found my old name when you Googled up “Native actors,” “trans actors,” “Native trans actors,” “two spirit writers,” and the like. The day I found my Google panel was one of the scariest days of my life. I used to look myself up whenever I needed to write a bio for a project because I was bad about keeping score. One day, there I was, arms outstretched, “Protect the Caribou” written across my black leather wingspan in dentalium and bone. Dad used to say we just Forrest Gump our way through life, but now I’m here and I don’t think I can anymore.
Absent of a marketable past, then, I look to the future. The college I want to go to, the one I’m doing all this work for, it’s just down the road a bit. I’ve got all this paperwork filled out. When I first told my Auntie Mary about this prelaw program, she went, “Oh, yeah? You wanna be a lawyer?” and I stammered because not really, but also not no. It’s not that simple. I feel like–
I don’t want anything. Which isn’t true, obviously. I want food. I want warmth. I want sex and love and romance and happiness. I want to bulk up a little bit. I want money. I want to go for a long walk in the woods and I want to be forgiven for every bad thing I’ve ever done to the people I love or maybe I want to be punished for it, not by God but by them, directly. Just one big, cathartic slap would do. Like how when you hit your sibling and to keep them from crying you say wait, wait, no, you can hit me back. I want to meet the other person in Baltimore who moved here from Bemidji and ask why we both made the same decision. I want to see every photo that’s ever been taken of me by strangers in public and I want to be paid for the labor of being beautiful and unprepared. I want a real job, or an agent, someone who can manage all this money shit for me and has my best interests at heart. I want to prove myself because it feels like all this snaking around has rendered me untrustworthy, like I’ve built a house of leaves around myself and now everything that must be seen is camouflaged and the rest of my flesh shimmers. Copper wire all exposed after it’s torn from a condemned building. The rich get richer and the poor get wretched, have breakdowns day after day and dance on the edge of a knife.
I want you to stay here, with me, in hell. I know what I’m asking. I know the weight of it. I want you to stay with us just a little bit longer. I know it hurts. I know it’s the worst it’s been, I know there’s this godawful rift opening up, jagged and raw and bloody as an open, gangrenous wound. I can’t promise you a dawn after this darkness. I can’t promise you anything. Just stay. Crawl with me through this muck, Eden behind us, burning. Bury your face in the dirt and let the dead grass rain down over you.
Certain places we cannot return to. The coordinates remain, the address is the same, but the context has changed. Whoever we occupied these spaces with, whatever we were going through at the time, the moon’s apogee, the temperature, whether or not the ground was wet or dry, all of this decides and defines the place. You know what I’m talking about. You can’t go back to high school, for example, even in dreams. You’ve hardened and cracked and hatched. You’ve grown and changed.
One such absent place, for me, is the porch where Lily Gladstone first told us she was going to quit acting.
Hot summer’s day bled into brittle night. The sun lowered behind the Rocky Mountains like a wounded animal. A bruise spread across the sky. I can’t recall if this was the old house or if our elder had moved already. The old house and the new house have similar porches in the dark. Besides, if you’ve been keeping up with the press, they all say it’s hard to look away from Lily when they’re talking. That TikTok of Martin and Francesca Scorsese, “she consumed,” comes to mind. So we sat on the porch, I at her feet like an overgrown child. A cherry burned in her mouth and then between her fingers as she jut her chin out at some dying future. Waved it off.
“This isn’t working,” said Lily. “So why force it?”
What struck me in that moment was their tone. Their head’s always been screwed on real tight, as they say, plus a total lack of desperation. There was no self-pity or wallowing when she spoke. Lily was like a mechanic under a carriage of dwindling opportunities, sliding out from beneath the machine and shaking her head. Not worth the effort or the cost of materials to fix. Sorry. Better get you a new car.
Lily took another languid drag of her cigarette and chuckled. I looked at her carefully. There are people on this planet who electrify and magnetize. There are birth lotteries and hard-won victories and debates about who deserves what. My favorite thing to hear is, “You’re not special.” I was raised in houses of fast-paced discussions and constant commentary. Our late mom Carol, who was alive on that porch with us, would get into it with our dad, Shaawano, about the concept of “deserving.” I don’t remember who took what stance. I just remember drawing my own conclusions. Nobody deserves anything. That’s not nihilism. What I mean is if you get in a terrible accident, if you get an STI or your dog dies, you didn’t deserve it. God’s not punishing you. And if you get ten thousand dollars in a tragic windfall, you didn’t deserve that, either. Someone made the decision to write you into their will. Someone loved you. Does that make sense?
We watched Lily decide her life wasn’t going how she wanted or planned it. We listened to their low, earthen drawl. We were on their land. You could see Chief Mountain if you slanted your eyes toward Lily’s shoulder and darted them out to your right very quickly. There are the places and then there’s the imagined future where we tell someone about the places. In that moment I was in love with some girl back in Wisconsin, I think, and half my time was spent fantasizing about how best to describe the big sky to her. I wanted this girl back home to fall in love with me because of how much I loved the big sky, how the big sky seemed to love me. That future died, too, or never happened. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to anyone about these summers. I still can’t, not really. That’s okay. But that’s how I’m able to remember all of this so clearly.
Lily planned a graceful pivot and allowed herself a few minutes of mirthful bitterness. A working actor is like a desert island. Every audition a message in a bottle. Sometimes the rescue doesn’t come. She finished her cigarette. We all saw the metaphorical door close.
Years passed between the first resignation and the famous one. Mere months after the porch, Lily was cast in a highly-anticipated Kelly Reichardt project, Certain Women. We were so proud of them. I told and retold that story, the story of how Lily quit acting and then got a big, important role. When Certain Women went to streaming, it was a goddamn event. All of us stood in one of our siblings’ living rooms—whoever had the biggest screen and the best sound system at the time—and sat through two hours of grim, contemplative Montanan drama. Lily garnered some accolades for her performance, well-earned, and then the No DAPL protests pushed Indians into the mainstream. It seemed every chimookomaanag who’d ever called themselves a producer wanted to sink their talons into Lily. Projects were thrown her way like a cat offers carcasses to its owner. Will you eat this? Is this good for you?
I moved from New Mexico to Seattle. Roomed with my sister Lacey and her kids. This was 2016. I’d recently shot a sizzle reel for a project—Six and Bisti—which has transformed from a Spaghetti Western into something deeper, what I’ve been describing for about five years now as “a love letter to our ancestors.” This is my shameless plug for Tse’Nato’, by the way. Make of that what you will. Anyways, I was eighteen going on nineteen. Lily Gladstone was sometimes in our house. My nieces were five years old and three years old. One shared a name with Lily, so we differentiated with a nickname I won’t tell you because it’s ours. Lily chased the girls—shrieking with laughter—around the tungsten suburban purgatory we occupied (yet another place none of us can return to) and when it was the girls’ bedtime, Lily sat on the back porch with us. We told each other stories. About half of my adulthood memories of Lily are either on the porch or in a park. It’s almost always nightfall.
“Because Native people are trendy now,” Lily had said during one of these late-night talks. “I’m busy.”
I wonder what happens to all the aborted films. I’d auditioned for a few, back when I was pre-transition. Always the same role: over-sexualized Native girl gets brutalized on camera and dies. Murder or exposure. One role went to another friend of ours, someone more successfully female, but besides her frigid midwinter selfie, I never heard any more about it. Thank God, though, because she’s had a much better career since.
I had a dream last night someone asked me where my film went. I said “it’s in development hell” and they laughed. Then they asked if I believed it could be raised from the inferno. On the far wall, Lily’s Golden Globes acceptance speech played on loop. I nodded.
“A lot of things are possible now,” I said.
Because of Lily Gladstone, I tend to call everyone by their full names. Part of the reason is because I think it’s funny. Ellie Hyojung Lee was in my house the other day and said, “You name drop all these people in a way that makes me think you’re referencing like, a famous person, but it’s always just some guy.” That’s the other half of it. When you’re on a porch late at night with Lily Gladstone and they’re telling you something important, you realize all at once that you are privy to some machinations of human history. You can reach your hand out and feel the fabric of spacetime warp. There is a man behind the curtain, kind of, and it’s you and your kin. The sacred task is to remember that this person, this brilliant, furious, hyperactive, bizarre and beautiful person, is also just some guy.
I’d be remiss not to tell you, then, about Erica Tremblay.
We were deep in the pandemic. What we didn’t know was that there’d be a moment, three years from now, on live television, where our loved one would look across a glittering sea of drunken stars and stare right into the eyes of the greatest living director and, voice thick with affection, call him “Marty.” No. At that time, we were all, including Lily, just doing our best. I had long since quit the film industry. Instead I built robots for a living on the edge of Ithaca, New York. Carol had died almost three years prior, in July of 2018. A month after her, our friend Leilani, who Lily also once taught, passed on. Then our grandfather. A new trio of deaths had just begun in 2021, but I didn’t know that yet. Erica—who is Seneca-Cayuga—lived on her people’s own land due to a series of strange coincidences. That’s her story to tell. Lily knew Ithaca well—she had apparently stayed with my parents for a brief period of time, but that’s their story—and decided to put Erica and I in contact.
Erica and I went for a long walk through Cascadilla Gorge. I loved her right away. Her eyes are difficult to describe. Sometimes they’re ice. Sometimes they’re the waterfalls of her homeland. Usually they’re sharp and conspiratorial. She and Lily have the same wry undercurrent when they talk about the lives they lead. A very low bullshit tolerance and a very high regard for what’s real, what my Tuscarora friend Meredith’s child calls “for real for real.” At the time, Erica and Lily were writing their feature length collaboration, Fancy Dance. Erica asked if I could play Lily in the Sundance screen test. My dad would play Lily’s character’s adoptive father. We agreed to it.
Life happened. Dad moved out of Ithaca in 2021, back to our homelands. I stayed. Got black mold poisoning. Followed him. Moved to Baltimore in October of 2023. Gave away my laptop. Watched Killers of the Flower Moon twice, both times at the Charles Theatre. Got a free laptop from Erica that I used as the centerpiece for my home desktop setup. Started to write again. Remembered to breathe.
When I was little, I learned about “all my relations.” I tried to imagine what that could mean. Before I’d been given that teaching, my dad told me that if I ever had trouble falling asleep, I should start listing off everyone who loves me. I stopped doing that pretty much as soon as I started because I’d get overwhelmed and begin to cry. But here both lessons come to mind. There are all these filaments coming out of my heart right now. I asked Lily—didn’t even congratulate her, by the way, which was literally so crazy of me (but I guess this is kind of a congratulations)—for their consent to write about them on this website. I asked Erica, too, and then I texted Grant Conversano, a filmmaker I met out in Camden, Maine, at a CIFF screening pre-pandemic. This next part of my ramble has a lot to do with them.
One of the big things I was most excited about when I moved to Baltimore in 2023 was my proximity to the train station. I can go to New York City basically whenever now, though I’m such a homebody, you have to dangle a carrot in front of my face to get me to leave my intensely curated apartment. Around the time Killers of the Flower Moon came out, my carrot was a meeting with Nara Milanich. We were gonna talk about her followup to 2019’s Paternity: the Elusive Quest for the Father, and on a whim, I texted Lily Gladstone: are you in nyc rn?
Their quick reply: Are YOU in NYC right now?!?!
After a nourishing meeting with Nara, I found Lily and her college bestie Gillian in Central Park, right next to the carousel. There’s something here about cycles and horses. A sharper eye than mine might be able to hone in on it. We walked and talked and sat in the dark and talked. We joked, all three of us, about “the new normal” bearing down on Lily. We laughed. Lily showered me in little trinkets because I was having a flareup and their immediate response was to scurry to and fro until they assembled a care package. I love the articles I find that mention this quirk of theirs, the way they’ll sometimes move from room to room like a little kid showing you their toys for the first time. Then they’ll soften and grow serious, their luminous face changing planes. Shifting gears.
We entered the subway together and they handed me a KN95 mask, marbled in the same colors as my apartment. Of course, I didn’t tell them this. I just let my jaw drop a little. They put on a matching mask and said, “So people see we’re friends.” I had run out of words at this point. I just kept saying I missed you. I missed you so much.
My friend Charles, who performs harsh, experimental noise under the name FLOSE, had a show in Brooklyn the next night. A friend of mine from Ithaca, Han, was going to meet me for tacos beforehand, Charles being their roommate and all. I told Grant Conversano where I was and they found me after the FLOSE set. I’d tried to stay as long as possible, but the subwoofers turned my stomach. I’m stone cold sober and here I was, staggering out of a bar in Brooklyn on a Tuesday night. Conversano followed me out and I collapsed into the heavily graffitied outdoor seating area. Their hair was long, flowed over their shoulders. They watched me with an unreadable expression.
“Hold my hand,” I said.
They held my hand.
“It’s not just the harsh noise,” I said. “At least, I don’t think.”
“I know,” said Conversano.
They’d gone through something similar. When they were around nineteen, twenty years old, one of their close friends had also been swept into the tide of fame and prestige. One minute you’re in an empty field with someone you love and the next minute, they’re nominated for a Golden Globe or an Academy Award. Nausea had overtaken Conversano, too, a placeless, sourceless nausea. Their friend was an actor. Conversano is a director. There was no jealousy, no obvious reason for this sudden, full body illness. Not jealousy but magnetism. The tremendous, crushing weight of a vibrational shift, of contexts changing and histories being written and rewritten. Doors closing. Doors opening. I imagined a gigantic alien ship with a tractor beam. How it comes into our field and chooses who it chooses. Takes who it takes. And there you stand in the crop circles, staring up at the sky as your friend is carried off. The big sky.
My father had me read Foucault’s Panopticism when I was like, twelve. I met Lily Gladstone shortly afterwards. Red Eagle Soaring has a summer program called SIYAP. They hire working artists to come wrangle all us shitass kids. Lily was one such unfortunate soul. I’m kidding. She held her own. We loved her. Obviously we still love her. We were also shitasses.
One summer, there were all these child psychologists around. They kept taking notes. They were white. I have always had a terrible ability to pressurize a room when I’m angry or upset. I suck the life out of everything and drag everyone else down with me. I do this less and less the older I get, but I still have my moments. That summer was no exception. I hated being surveilled and I hated being annotated. I ruined the vibe as thoroughly as I could. The sky above Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center opened up and a torrential downpour began. All day just grey and rhythmic. A thousand tiny water drums. I scrambled up the round staircase and into one of the empty rooms we had smaller workshops in. There was a faux polar bear rug in the bay window and not much else. I sat down and ugly cried. Ashamed of my behavior. Ashamed of this terrible, awful thing inside me, this monster I swore lived just beneath my skin and pushed at my ribcage.
About five minutes into my meltdown, I heard the heavy pneumatic hiss of the door as it opened and shut. Lily crossed the big room in a few firm steps. They sat next to me, on my right. We were silent but for my occasional sniffle.
I won’t tell you everything they said. I was sixteen years old. I was the worst person I knew. I dreamt of blood, fire, men with masks and guns. I dreamt of war and famine and plague. I dreamt of things bigger than I could comprehend, things so bright, they burned through your eyelids. Lily had bangs back then. Her hair was in a ponytail. She wore a black tank top, black pants, and black shoes.
“There’s a paradigm shift coming,” Lily said. “Do you know what that means?”
I nodded. Kicked my feet against the wood slats.
“It’s gonna hurt,” said Lily. “It’s gonna hurt because healing always comes with hurt. Growing pains. It’s just growing pains.”
Ten years later, I lay on my back outside a bar in Brooklyn and held Grant Conversano’s hand.
“I had a hard time,” Conversano began, “growing up in the South and hearing everything was part of God’s plan. It felt unfair. Why would God listen to some of us, but not others? And you know, they say God’s plan about everything. The best and the worst.”
I hummed. “Your hands are soft.”
“I get that a lot. Apparently it’s a sign I’m untrustworthy.”
I laughed. Brushed my fingertips across their palm. Some of their memories flashed across my eyes. I knew they were theirs because I’d never seen trees that particular shade of green before.
“It’s not God’s plan. It can’t be. It’s all… chaos. Some of us are born, you know, into the worst conditions. We live for a short, hellish time and we die horribly and we never find out why. And then some of us are told from birth that we’re special. That we’re different.”
“The accident of your birth,” I said.
“Exactly. So we can’t dwell on these things. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I find myself sitting somewhere just asking something dumb like, ‘why do I get to have so much fun all the time?’ But we can’t lose ourselves to this idea that there’s some inherent specialness. These things just… happen how they happen.”
“And you have to deal with it.”
“And we have to deal with it.”
I sat up. The nausea subsided. On the table between us, someone had written in sun-yellow marker: “Condemned 2 Win.” I stared at it a long time. Hammered my knuckles against the wood. Huffed, an ironic grin across my face.
“You are all so lucky I’m not insane,” I said. “All these patterns.”
My heart hurt from only seeing Lily for what felt like a split second. I filled the absent places with more questions. I wanted to hear more about Conversano’s life. Where are you going? What are you doing now? Who are you on your way to become?
I walked them home. I lingered. Not God’s plan but whatever it was Lily saw on that porch. A future like a broken machine or a boat dead in the water. Closing the door. Saying no. Saying not right now. Knowing when to quit and when to get back up again. When to hope. When to keep the faith.
There are things I haven’t told you. Things I will never tell you. One thing, though. A couple years ago, we were all in an auntie’s house. Me, my siblings, the kids, Lily, and Lily’s mom, Betty. I had no idea Betty wasn’t Native. That’s kind of a compliment, I guess. Most white moms are like, incurably white. Betty existed in the patchwork foreground, a gentle smile on her face as Lily and my sisters played with the kids and talked serious talk in equal measure. One of the little ones was going through a phase, something she picked up in daycare. You play a hand game with someone. One hand goes here, the other goes there. Three claps. Maybe four. I can’t recall all the details. But if you end the game with your hands crossed over each other, it means you’re “related.” Betty and Lily were there as our precious one, four years old at the time, crossed her hands over mine and cried out, ecstatic, “We’re related!” before tackling me.
“My mom’s name is Peace,” said Lily. “So my full name is Lily Peace Gladstone.”
Betty Peace smiled big and shook her head. There are places we cannot return to and I mourn it. Let the grief melt each moment into the patchwork memory. Let me live through this again and again but more importantly, let us live.
The Golden Globes videographer zooms in on a beautiful older woman. A big smile, long white hair, rosy cheeks. Tears in her eyes. High definition in the foreground while in the background, on her left and right, respectively, sit Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese. Not God’s plan at all, but Lily’s. The indomitable drive of “just some guy” to accomplish what is otherwise considered impossible. The growing pains clarified in this one vibrant moment. I sat on Phil’s couch and cried happily while everyone in that vast, violent room stood up and applauded. I took pictures of Betty. Phil took pictures of me.
They used to run our dialogue backwards. Time runs backwards for me, too, sometimes, slipshod and adrift in the loom of the universe. The rain goes up, up, up and away into the grey clouds. The sun comes back from behind the Rocky Mountains and swallows all the purple. Smoke disappears into Lily’s hands and the porch gets brighter, brighter still.
“This isn’t mine,” Lily says, lifting a solid gold model of Planet Earth. “I’m holding it right now.”
They took the Indians in elder housing to see Killers of the Flower Moon the week it opened. My grandma called me up afterwards.
“Hey. Your lil friend did pretty good.”
I laughed. Grandma Rose has always had the uncanny ability to humanize the historical, to boil and reduce all we can’t hold into a few simple words.
Summer is irreducible. This doesn’t stop us from trying. I could write about the moments that define summers past. I could play the magician and make you know without knowing the before-and-after of each solstice. I could, but I won’t.
There was no transition period for us here. One week, we were being pan-seared on the pavement, the next, I had to put on “the uniform,” the standard Pretty Girl outfit I’ve poured my body into every September since seventh grade: oversized sweater, short-shorts, red Converse. The parts of the sum matured, I guess. The sweater isn’t a joke anymore, but a carefully knitted warm beige number with a full-color embroidered buck standing on the edge of a river across the chest. The shorts are embroidered, too, by me, “ur gay” written in fuzzy pink lettering. An accusation, a challenge, exposure therapy for the guys who flinch every time I look at one of my friends with love in my eyes. The Converse are no longer canvas, but suede and leather with red piping. This morning, in the Blue Moon Too, a beautiful girl with ash blonde hair down past her waist and pecan brown skin smiled up at me shyly. She looked younger than me by a lot, or maybe she was just holding herself like that.
“I love your outfit,” she said. Her voice was clipped and restrained, like she was trying to swallow the words before they could be properly heard. She held her mouth in such a frightened way. I smiled warmly at her and said something stupid and honest back, “I love your hair,” or something along those lines. She didn’t hear me. She took a breath and said, resolute and somber, “I love people who just be who they are and show the world. Don’t care what nobody says.”
I glanced over her symmetrical piercings, one on each nostril, one in each dimple. I hoped she could hear what I meant when I said “me, too.”
A chill ran through me. In the seventh grade, a different girl, also with ash blonde hair and brown skin, had come to me with a similar declaration about my own perceived independence. I had bristled at that girl back then, because I had attitude problems and everyone knew it.
“People say shit about me?” I had demanded. My hair was long, so black it looked blue, and fell in my face like the Grudge.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” my classmate had said. Later, she apologized, and what was worse, she meant it.
I wore Converse for my whole life because my dad wears Converse. For the past couple years, I haven’t, choosing instead to lace into my grandfathers’ respective combat boots or the tattered pair of original rubber Doc Martens my dad and I scored at Trader K’s in Ithaca, years before it closed. Thirty bucks and they’d been made in England for real! Otherwise I have these Nike N7s, the Fly chunky boots I stole from Ava, and the black and white checkered platform shoes my mother wore every day while she was pregnant with me. If you were the psychoanalyzing type, you’d have a field day with my closet.
This summer, I primarily wore the Doc Martens and the N7s. The N7s are sort of honey-beige and spattered with bleach and paint stains. Unsure why. The model prior to these ones was made to look and feel like cartoon moccasins. Mine look like regular shoes, just… earthier? They give me another inch or so of height I don’t need and make me feel like I’m exercising when I’m not. The Doc Martens always blister me and I keep thinking I need to buy gel inserts, but I never remember this when I’m in a place that sells them. Anyways.
Near the end of June and my residency at Cranberry Lake Biological Station, I was in Terrance’s cabin with a bunch of professors plus my dad. We were all visiting and laughing and I was starting to have an allergic reaction to Terrance’s cat, so I stood up just as we got on the subject of my shoelaces. My Docs had already chewed up one pair of shoelaces, so I walked around with replacements. Then one of the replacements got fucked while I was on my way back from the hospital, so I needed new ones. I informed the group of this because I love small talk and complaining about useless things.
“Wait,” my dad said, “you already have mismatched shoelaces, the hell is the matter with you?”
One of my shoelaces says YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND over and over and over again, it’s true. I think my little sibling has the other one.
“Yes, and I’ll keep it as long as we’re on Native land,” I said, voice dripping with irony the white people definitely didn’t pick up on. “Enough scrutiny. Goodnight.”
I walked back to my cabin, pressing my “native land” foot into the spongy earth as hard as I could, as if empty words by a goth-ish vaporwave brand making bank on stating the obvious could wake up the sleeping giants beneath. As if my sole and my soul were one. As if putting one foot in front of the other could fix any of this.
For a split second, this summer threatened to define itself as the one where I almost went blind. Then it was the summer of ill-advised hookups. Then it was the summer of taking the train. The summer I made my baby nephew really mad because I wouldn’t let him electrocute himself. The summer Taylor and I took the girls up into the big ferris wheel above Seattle. The summer I became beautiful. The summer I turned mean.
I was on the phone with my mother today after pulling into my aunt’s driveway. I had a laundry list of things that needed done and choices I had to make and I was still rotating the weekend in my head, trying to examine it from all angles. I’d gone to see Godflesh with Phil at the Baltimore Soundstage before performing with Andie, Kamya, LouLou and Genocide at the Daughters of Lilith’s inaugural art show opening, Venusian: an Exploration of Femininity Through the Planetary Lens of Venus.
When I’d shown up, everything was chaos, but the show went off beautifully and I rode the high of my new life all the way up to Ithaca, where I was the maid of honor at one of my best friends’ big gay trans wedding. Around 9pm that same night (this was Saturday) I pulled up at the Sacred Root Kava Bar to perform as Bogo La$ik on a bill with STCLVR, Prayer Rope, Phantom Project, Magnetic Coroner, and Compactor. Sunday, I finished a tattoo design commission in the Watershed while a group of elderly white Ithacans played Irish jigs loud as hell, Taylor squinting across the table at me in sensory overload and mounting irritation. Monday I was back in Baltimore for the Igorrr show, which might have just ruined all live music for me, because I can’t imagine anything being better than that.
I am telling you all of this because I’m going to tell you something else, but the thing I want to tell you is awful. Tom King writes about that in his book, the Truth About Stories. He tells this heartbreaking story about a friend of his who was made to recount all the traumas he’d endured, part and parcel with colonialism, and the more he rehashed this narrative, the sicker he got. Like the spirits that feed off our pain wanted more pain to feed off of. Like they were cultivating him.
So when I talk about anything extra fucked up, I cloak it in the banal and the funny and the stupid. All the things we forget about when we have those big, defining moments. There’s always a wedding. We don’t see the settled disputes, the nights the couple has sex in such a way, they feel like they’re going to dissolve into each other, the nights they don’t but they know they’re one beast anyways. The fridge magnets, the cold shoulders, the financial stress, the inside jokes, the periods and the hospital visits and the traffic jams. We just see the wedding.
Same goes for a funeral. We go for the dead. We pin them to the ground. We decide they’re in heaven or privately acknowledge they’re probably just nowhere. We do the protocols for our lodges and we cover the mirrors and photographs and we do not speak their names. We weren’t them, so we’re not there for all the days they spent feeling lonely, or angry, or stitching moment to moment with taste and touch and hunger and want and fear.
After Grandma Deanna died, I got mean. I got mean in a foreign way. The meanness did not come from me. It hunted me. It scoped me out. It did its research. Then, when it realized I was safe, it entered my mouth and now it inhabits my head, my throat, my bones.
In the car, on the phone, I wondered aloud to my mother if it had come from her. Our grandma.
“Like she couldn’t bring it with her to heaven,” I said, “so she shed it like a snake sheds its skin.”
“Holy fuck,” my mother said, in the tone she uses whenever an idea resonates. Then she gathered herself. “I mean, yeah. Heaven doesn’t need that shit.”
“I feel like someone handed me a gun,” I said. “I don’t know how to use it and I’m scared it’ll go off when it’s not supposed to.”
“Just sit with it,” my mother said. “It’s a useful tool. It’s a good thing. It can be a good thing.”
I told her at the Igorrr concert a guy tried to come onto me, but he looked too young for me, so I waved him off and it was like I’d used the Force on him. He was there and then he wasn’t, jettisoned away by the wave of my hand, out of my purview, out of the venue. I felt terrible. I felt powerful. Suddenly, everything I said or did had an extra bite to it, an extra weight. The pressure made me desperate. I looked at Phil often and tried to anchor myself on his familiarity, but my eyes swam with a cloying darkness I’ve observed in other people who are needy and cruel and don’t know how to control it.
This morning I borrowed Phil’s copy of This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno. I read most of the first bit at the bar in Blue Moon Too. When it got to Thiago tracing his own lineage, marked and marred by hurt, abuse, and murder, I shivered, because this summer hadn’t only been the summer of embodiment, death, sex, meanness and beauty. It had been the summer when a handful of people had, unprompted, told me their version of my father’s conception.
I’m careful talking about my family because you don’t deserve it. You don’t. I don’t know you like that and you don’t know me like that. In a world full of Indians trying to make it on TV, Indians watching Indians on TV, Indians who aren’t even Indian at all and we find out in the worst, ugliest ways, after those of us who fell out of community bared our very darkest selves to them, thinking they understood, I drag the dead weight of my unknown grandfather forward like a leash on a sick dog. There’d been a time when I was hungry, mad with obsession over this man who never claimed his children. I needed to know what he was so I could know what I was. Then I realized I never crossed his mind, would never cross his mind. I was a non-entity to him. He had impregnated a beautiful woman and left her like he probably had done a zillion times before and that was that was that. One night with the wrong man makes a girl a martyr, and the American Indian Movement was full of martyrs.
Besides, it wasn’t like this guy was my only tie to my… what? Ethnicity? Political affiliation? Full time god damned job? I knew who my biological grandma was. I knew she was gorgeous and sad. I knew she was strong. She used to be a bartender and ran with my other grandma’s siblings’ friend group. They said she was funny and hot and charming. They said she knew how to beat the shit out of someone in a way that changed the course of their life. They said a lot of the men followed her around like puppy dogs. I knew she died the same day I left Ithaca in a hurry. I knew I didn’t matter to her at all, but that didn’t stop her blood from being inside me any more than it stopped me crying over her for days. I know my real grandparents, the ones who raised my dad and worry about me all the time and give me presents and get on my nerves. I know my Papa Vince and my Grandma Gail and my Grandma Rose. I know if you’re not Native or of some adjacent cultural background, you’ve been counting up my Grandmas and trying to figure out how I got so many.
So you can imagine why, after my biological grandmother’s death, it’s been surreal to have so many people coming out of the woodwork at me to tell me who they think her babydaddy was.
It had been a little over a week since Deanna’s funeral. I was going to be crammed in a car with my mother, my little brother, and my little brother’s fiancee. We were going to Meskwaki Powwow. The Meskwaki Nation and I are on weird terms. I bear their name but not their status. I’ve written about this before. I’m more than happy to be a member of the White Earth Band of Minnesota Ojibwe, but the rules by which the Meskwaki Nation permits or denies their children continue to be a hot-button topic for the Fox people. Still, the Meskwaki Powwow is legendary for its rich history as an act of resistance and joy in the face of annihilation.
Dr. Charles Eastman, Dakota missionary for the YMCA recalled back in the late 19th/early 20th century, that, “One of the strongest rebukes I ever received from an Indian for my acceptance of [Christian] ideals and philosophy was administered by an old chief of the Sac and Fox [Meskwaki] tribe in Iowa.”
The elder had patiently sat through Eastman’s 1895 plea for Indian reformation and conversion before replying, “The white man shows neither respect for nature nor reverence toward God. You try to buy God with the by-products of nature. You try to buy your way into heaven, but you do not even know where heaven is. As for us, we shall follow the old trail. If you should live long, and some day the Great Spirit shall permit you to visit us again, you will find us still Indians, eating with wooden spoons out of bowls of wood.”
comic & commentary by Ba Ka ta bi a, from his book The Larry Andy People Fun Book
Eastman’s personalized call for reformation was partially due to the fact that the Meskwaki Nation’s response to the Religious Crimes Code had been to throw the biggest, most Meskwaki party ever. They held sporting events, group harvests, dances and art fairs open to the public until Smallpox decimated their village, prompting the U.S. government to burn said village to the ground and replace it with isolated houses, far away from one another. In 1913, the newly spaced out Meskwaki Nation renamed their harvest the Meskwaki Powwow, and invited outsiders to come celebrate. Performance has been a vibrant tradition with my mother’s tribe, and one of our ancestors even rode with Buffalo Bill back in the day as a career Indian. The Meskwaki mastered the art of double-speak—giving the white man one story while giving themselves another in the same exact breath.
Still Indians. We rolled into Meskwaki Nation and I melted into the familiar heat of it. I’d lived here as a small child and could always bear with the summers in a way I couldn’t elsewhere. I was happy to note this hadn’t changed, even with the world on fire. The trees and their knotted red trunks twisted up into the vast blue sky, their tiny green leaves shimmering gossamer in the soft breeze. Bitterness spiked, unexpected, at the back of my ribcage when I realized I’d need to reintroduce myself to people. When it hit me that this wasn’t mine to keep. I shook it off, that horrible, colonial sense of scarcity, and did my best to keep it at bay, even when my family spent my patience. Even when the third or so person asked “Where’s Chloe?” and I had to clench my jaw because that wasn’t even my deadname. Even when one of my mother’s family friends asked me both times when I showed up at his stand, “Where are you from?”
the writer next to his great-grandfather, floyd keahna
After we got some good Young Bear frybread, I realized I’d had it. I stood up and informed my family I’d be going on a walk to decompress.
I walked, aimless, for awhile. One of my friends was there because she was Miss International Two Spirit and was on the powwow trail as part of her regal duties. I wanted to see her but I also didn’t want to bother her. My extended family was everywhere, looking like me but brown, bearing our name. I didn’t want to bother them either. My mind was a ticker-tape of insecurity and I was so totally sick of it. I can’t deal with insecure people. It’s like, my biggest turn-off. So to be in the body of an insecure person gave me the ick, big time, but for the one person I couldn’t reject: myself. Eventually I wandered back to my mother’s friend’s stand. For the sake of the story, lets just call him the Artist.
The Artist’s partner is a gorgeous Native woman, we’ll call her Jay. She smirked up at me and then at her man. Behind them sat a third Indian I did not recognize.
“You gonna ask him where he’s from?” Jay sniped. “Again?”
The Artist shook his round head. He had pleasant features, curved and sloped all over, kind of like a turtle. His smile reached his eyes but only crossed half his face, like you’d caught him mid-thought and he didn’t want to tell you about it.
“Where you from?” asked the guy in the back. He was wearing sunglasses and grinned at me, pretending he was in on the joke when he wasn’t.
“My father’s from White Earth,” I said. “My mother’s from here. You know her.”
“I do,” said the Artist, laughing in the way everyone down there does when they think about my mother. “As a matter of fact, I know your father, too.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Your ma hauled him over round my place, oh, about twenty years ago now. Wanted to know if I was his dad.”
I stared at him, this small, round-faced man with no discernible features in common with me or anyone related to me, least of all my dad.
Jay raised her eyebrows at her man. The guy in the back had checked out the moment his joke didn’t land.
“I’m not, by the way. In case you were wondering.”
“But you could have been,” said Jay. She didn’t say it accusingly. If you’re dating in Indian country it’s like that. I already told one of my friends back home they can have me after my first divorce. Maybe my second. Even with so many of us being Christian, we just sort of have to be cool with people, well. Hitting it raw before they got with us, you know?
The Artist nodded, then shook his head emphatically. “Okay, well, I did, you know… I…”
“You got around,” said Jay.
“I got around! Didn’t we all? But I’m not his dad… or, his dad’s dad. I can’t be, I…”
The guy in the back, smelling blood, put down his phone and tuned in. “Huh? Who’s this kid again? He lookin’ for his dad? Are you his dad?”
“No!” the Artist yelped. “I’m not his…” he looked at me then, “I’m not your dad! And I’m not your dad’s dad, either.” He took a short, jittery sip of his pop and let his eyes unfocus. He jabbed one callused finger out, partly at me, partly at someone only he could see. “You know, I’d bet you I seen your grandfather, though. Or who he could be. A potential. See, I was at that protest. Summer of 1970. July. I was supposed to, you know. With this girl. But I was at a protest instead. And then you know who I come upon is this Oneida girl. I think she was Oneida, at least, I can’t really recall. Couldn’t have been taller than five two, five three at best. Backseat of a station wagon with this big guy from way over in Pine Ridge. Giant man. Two of them goin’ at it at that protest. And I’ll bet you anything that’s your grandfather.”
I blinked at the Artist. The meanness in me was new yet, but I could feel her curling around my tongue, ready to snark, “But I don’t wanna be from Pine Ridge,” knowing damn well I’ll be canceled for saying that, knowing every Indian I’ve shared this unsaid whiny rebuke with found it funny as hell anyways. Instead I said nothing.
The Artist nodded at me again, his brown eyes firm and intense with the “how-it-is” of it all, the surety that he’d solved some decades-old mystery, right here, never mind that he just told some kid he barely knew the story of the kid’s father’s conception. Like, ew.
“Look into that,” said the Artist. “Big guy from Pine Ridge. He mighta been six foot seven.”
“You, uh, you got a name?” Off of him shaking his head, “or, uh, literally anything?”
“Nah,” said the Artist.
Awkward silence. Then the guy in the back gestured to where there were two bowler hats with beaded hat bands on display on the table.
“You should buy one of these,” he said. “You have the head shape for it.”
“That’s okay,” I said, already drifting away. Then I walked backwards into a world where I hadn’t heard that story, a world where I was just some guy in a long line of “just some guys,” all the way back to the lucky bastards who got to live in a world where our people weren’t batshit crazy all the time, in a world where we could eat our ash bread and our tuber and berry soup with wooden spoons and wooden bowls.
Part of my obsession with the unknown grandfather has to do with my own mortality. My mother’s side, both sides, all sides, tend to live well into their eighties and nineties. People were shocked when my father’s mother made it as far as she did. Apparently she was the last one of her siblings, a fact tragic both in its finality and my cold tone relaying it. I should care more. I do, it’s just that she and her siblings exist to me the same way parallel universes do, or Imagine Dragons. Like, I could tell you all the words to Radioactive, but I don’t really feel it the way the average American Eagle centrist Protestant feels it. Fuck. I don’t think I’m putting that sentiment in the final post. Or maybe I will, just because I need you to know that I kind of suck. I’m bitter and lonely and part of me will always be that little girl, staring at a picture of an old, hard, martyred woman on her father’s phone, knowing with a deep, irreversible sense of betrayal that that was his mother and that she would not be in our lives.
Therein lies the other part of the obsession. That little girl realized it takes two people to make a baby. Therefore the other half of the equation was still out there, somewhere, maybe capable of loving his child. Maybe he could be convinced, once he saw how cute and sweet and special his three little grandchildren were. The girl I was prayed for that, even though she knew by then and I know by now that men are fickle and infuriating, and Native men doubly so.
I have, however, inherited my father’s handwriting. That thing everyone calls chicken scratch because it is. I used to have “pretty girl handwriting,” the bubbly, big-looped lettering you see in the notebook of a girl who tries hard and gets results, even though I did neither, but now that I’m a Native man in a big city, I’ve become his echo. It makes me wonder how much of his personality, how many of his traits, came from these two strangers. There is the daisy-chain we’re tied to by what the anthropologists call “fictive kinship,” and then there’s all that blood.
The funny thing about genocide is that you can’t remember anything before it. Everybody who could have told you what was what is dead now. Been dead. Murdered or disappeared or incarcerated or maybe they just never returned your dad’s calls. The funnier thing is that the people who killed your grandparents are still alive. They have houses and incomes and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Some of their grands are your friends. They share Mary Oliver posts about letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves and brand themselves with Tove Jansson, mushroom philosophies, esoteric ramblings, God. The by-products of nature, buying their way into heaven. Perhaps the funniest thing of all is that you have to be civil about this. You can’t just remember everything and take it out on them. Sins of the father or whatever. You have to look them in their wide, blue or green or grey eyes, and you have to hum in soft acknowledgement when they tell you about how they’re on some great and beautiful journey, how they’re really trying to find what works.
Back at the Watershed, I sat across from Taylor and sketched a tattoo commission for Mashkode-Sage in silence. She had asked for golden eagle feathers and a buffalo. “You know the kind.” Back when I’d crashed with her on one of my uncountable trips across the country, she’d said she was pretty sure she was done with tats. I nodded at that; she had a healthy assortment. Me, I want more. I keep telling people I look like a child scribbled on me with a Sharpie and ran away. Smokii said, “Yeah, that’s what it looks like when you don’t have money for tats.” He snorted and I mentally filed the exchange away for when I wanted to hurt myself later for doing everything wrong and out-of-order.
That’s one of the things I like most about Mashkode-Sage, actually. She will make these hardline declarations and go back on them when more of the narrative unfolds. It makes me feel dynamic by association. Like her ability to grow and change is somehow talismanic with mine.
She is also the child of an adoptee. She writes about it in her own words on her Instagram. Like this, we understand each other.
I do commissions infrequently. I think part of me still feels guilty for every time I dropped the ball, going all the way back to the fifth grade, so I punish myself by keeping my talents close to my chest. If I don’t set up any expectations, there’s no way I’ll let people down. But there, in the Watershed, the goddamned folk band wailing away, I felt like this could be something I could do. This could be income.
I finished the two feathers with a flourish. Pride warmed me and I showed Taylor, practically vibrating with it. Then I started in on the buffalo.
still from buffalo bone china, taken from dana claxton’s website
A long time ago, we went to the Hearts of Our People exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Few pieces resonated with me as deeply as Dana Claxton’s Buffalo Bone China, released the year I was born, which consists of a short experimental film projected above a pile of shattered bone china, reminiscent of that one photograph I refuse to share because it makes me sick. You know the one. Throughout the video installation, there’s a repeating clip of a herd of buffalo running. The rhythm of the soundscape and the repetition grinds it into you: these are People. Their enormous heads mopped with thick bangs over high, severe cheekbones and deep, wet eyes. Their arms and their legs and their broad shoulders. They dance like we dance. Their rage and love are ours. I don’t know how long I sat in the blue dark, watching them. Trying not to cry because I didn’t want one of the many, many white women who’d been filming my journey through the gallery to find me and capture my noble savage grief on camera.
As if I’d thrown it in the freezer that day and only now rediscovered it, the feelings came back full force. This time there would be no context for the outsiders to latch onto. I would be just another white boy in a bar, upset and lonesome, blinking at the wall. I traced my sketch of Mashkode-Sage’s buffalo until I felt something spring to life in the cold, digital slab. Then I did the line-work and, with a shit-eating, manipulative grin, added a penis so the buffalo could reproduce.
I stole my insistent terminology, “martyr,” from Carmen. We’d been up late in her apartment again, talking for hours, and somehow got on the subject of the American Indian Movement. All the unclaimed babies it made. Most of the secret-not-secret stories about AIM are shared like this. Two women talking after midnight, their legs almost touching, their eyes on the wall or the floor.
Both of the horror novels I’ve read this year, John Darnielle’s Devil House and Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us, blend genres and interrogate ethics. What are our responsibilities as writers, as storytellers? What comes through when we violate these unspoken contracts? Sitting down to write this, I was faced with the problem countless Native writers before me have dealt with since the moment you demanded an explanation. When does this stop being my story to tell?
Maybe it stops here. Maybe I’ll leave you with the image of me and Carmen, mere feet apart, talking about the men who, by their own narcissism, caused our respective dynasties to exist. Rootless or headless, but extant nonetheless. Sure, most tribes, like the Meskwaki Nation, require proof of paternity to enroll a child, so if your dad bounced, or better still, never knew you even happened, you’re fucked on the federal recognition front. And sure, a lot of AIMsters justified their anti-birth control stance as being part of some great repopulation initiative. Never mind that all they needed to make a person was a station wagon and a protest, while their women had to give up the rest of their natural lives, had to face the government’s insistence upon stealing and trafficking their babies to Christian homes who did everything you could imagine and more to the poor bastards.
But someone clawed their way out of there. A couple someones. Scarred and burnt and ugly and alive, these kids grew up and struck out and had kids they claimed, kids they kept, kids they raised in whatever approximation of “our ways” they could manage.
Or they didn’t.
Sometimes I dream about the ones who didn’t. I have an aunt I visit with in dreams, you know. She’s got ash blonde hair and pecan brown skin she tries to bleach. She wears a little gold crucifix around her neck that she clutches whenever she sees me. She says I must be the Devil. That I’m here to do the devil’s work. We walk through a forest that will never see the light of day. Thick, ropy vines hang from the dark green canopy, exposed blood vessels threading the telltale heart of her pain. I don’t confirm or deny her accusation. I just walk with her, my bare feet in the spongy earth.
One foot in front of the other.
I am the father and the Mother’s brother’s distant cousin / the children and the wives / a multitude of thousands live inside my head, manufacturing weapons, demanding to be fed.
TRIGGER WARNING: THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS MENTIONS OF DOMESTIC AND SEXUAL ABUSE, ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY, SELF-HARM AND DISORDERED EATING
❤
When I’m about twenty years old, I take a subway train with an artist who’s had more of an impact on me than he probably is aware of. I befriend him after he and his brother/co-collaborator resolutely do not cast me in their short tragicomedy, Do More of What Makes You Happy, which is about a chronically ill person and their friends struggling to make ends meet in a hostile world. Three or four days from this moment, I will have overstayed my welcome in their apartment, because my then-boyfriend will have done something violent to me that will leave me unmoored for the next several months. Neither me nor the artist know this now. We are taking the train to Manhattan, if I recall correctly. Somehow we get to talking about something that leads the artist to say this to me:
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Whenever I think about you, I think, yeah. Cleo’s okay. Cleo’s got their shit together.”
IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT I NO LONGER GO BY “CLEO” AND PREFER TO BE CALLED FRANKIE, FRANCIS, VARIOUS NICKNAMES THAT COME FROM THAT, AND/OR SHAAWAN.
It is an assertion so far and away from what my family (at this time I have only one friend, who is in agreement with my family) thinks of me, that I’m lost for words. The sound of the subway becomes the sound of my thoughts, kh-shunk, kh-shunk, kh-shunk, the high keen as it hits the brakes, the whistle of the gas-electric engine, the hiss and the bustle and the worrying of it all. I stare at him. He is not much older than me, but he seems more… established. More here. Here, as in here, as in on this earth and of this world.
From the ages of seventeen to twenty-four, my body does not feel like my own. I take selfies with an obsessive feverishness. Like I need proof-of-life. Like I’m holding myself hostage and threatening my own future. I post all of the selfies and I scroll through the comments about how handsome I am with the dead-eyed, thin-lipped expression of Patrick Bateman. No pleasure to be gleaned from anything. When my then-boyfriend says what he says to me and does what he does, I’m not so self-hating as to think I deserve it—I am just so numb to everything that my sort of doomed, dead-man-walking energy affirms that the violence I face is just a statistical inevitability. Part of the narrative, as it were, or, in more recent memetic terms, a “canon event.”
What I tell people when I explain the arc of my transition is that I cloistered myself. I think I’ve said the sentence “I hermetically sealed myself” more times than I can count. This is both true and reductive. I tried as hard as I could to be like every other trans person I came across on Tumblr—to be “Discord-enough” as one of my friends ungenerously says—and keep my body in a house, keep my mind online. Life found a way, though. Against my will, life happens.
I’ll pause here. I am twenty-five again, going on twenty-six. This might be the ugliest thing I’ve written to date. I still feel like writing it. I still feel like sharing it with you.
So I seal myself away. This is how my first few “relationships” occur. I meet them online and they are terrible people. I still love them worse than I’ve ever loved anyone. I still let them hurt me. At one point, one of my online friends, who is doing the exact same thing I am, says they can’t believe they let a guy in cat ears who never leaves his bedroom destroy their capacity for intimacy. This is a bizarrely common tale, as it happens. Many people who grow up on Tumblr find ourselves utterly obliterated by total losers. When we come of age, much later than our cisgender and heterosexual peers, mind, we tend to avoid looking back at the exploded shells of our past lives. I tried. I tried a couple times. One of my therapists looked at my intake form, which outlined for several paragraphs the part of my love life that coincided with my detransition—when I was catfished or maybe just hallucinated the whole ordeal—and said “I can’t help you with any of this. I’m sorry. I’ll take you on and we can talk about whatever led up to all of that, but this… this is totally outside my wheelhouse.”
Even sealed, I shuttled my vessel around. I was “always on that damn phone” and beholden to people miles or eons away from me who craved the kind of life I led, who wanted to be my partner because I was maybe their ticket out of whatever personal hell their families had built for them. I avoided eye contact with anyone in real life who might have wanted to touch me. I curled up on leather couches and my fingers went fast, fast, fast, against that pane of glass and all the desperate, lonely people who lived inside of it. When I had no choice but to put that phone down, I opened my eyes to art galleries, film festivals, people and places who, against all odds and again, against my will, loved me. Wanted to be a home for me in a similar way the chronically online wanted me to be a home for them.
And I masculinized. My body grew and shifted and changed. Early in my transition, when I was nineteen years old and maybe four or five months on T, I found myself at Toronto International Film Festival. I had been promised small changes over a long period of time, but I was already read as a cis man always, even if I didn’t bind. At one of the mixers, a butch/femme lesbian couple from Israel crossed the sea of pale faces and stood right in front of me. The butch was six inches shorter than I was, and her femme was six inches taller. The femme did not speak, but the butch smirked up at me, eyes cloying and hungry.
“Excuse me,” they said, “are you gay?”
I blinked at them. I was wearing makeup and a button-down shirt with the collar open to my cleavage. I’d been a lesbian for my whole young adulthood, but I had just begun my horrid dalliance with my then-boyfriend, who, only two weeks of DMing in, told me never to leave him.
“I… I guess,” I said.
“I knew it,” said the butch. “I see you and I think, that is far too beautiful to be a straight man.”
Satisfied, the butch and femme left me to my beautiful isolation, and I scanned the faces for someone, anyone, who could keep me here.
An Argentinian woman approached me. She was flanked by two sharply-dressed cis men, who were almost too handsome. I looked down at her and tried not to notice how uncomfortable the men were with my proximity.
“You are the only real person here,” said the Argentinian woman, by way of greeting.
I could say nothing. I glanced up at her men, then back at her. They seemed real enough.
She grabbed one of her men and snapped at him in Spanish. He looked like she’d just slapped him, and scowled down at me.
“You two,” she said, “take care of this boy. Promise me you won’t let anything happen to him.”
The men looked at me. Now that I was a boy and not a gay man, I was less of a threat. The blond one actually smiled. The Argentinian woman squeezed my hands. Her hands were small and hot and soft, like she had never worked a day in her life. She leaned in and smelled me and then walked away. Her men left shortly afterwards, but everywhere I went, I felt their line of sight pierce me. True to her word, nothing happened to me. Well, almost nothing.
from Surviving Romance on Webtoon
I am telling you all of this for one specific reason.
When people push against trans healthcare—indeed, when they push against “the whole transgender thing,” which is to say, our lives, our very existence—many say “it’s not going to make you happy.” “It” could be anything from a change of pronouns to a wardrobe shift, but more often than not, “it” is hormone replacement therapy, gender-affirming surgeries, the whole medical backbone to the transsexual experience. This justification has always baffled me. If something I want won’t make me happy, isn’t that my business? And furthermore, why deny me the freedom of unhappiness? Never mind that the people who say “it’s not going to make you happy” are often, themselves, miserable and proud of it. Never mind that their needless suffering allegedly brings them closer to their God. What about my needless suffering? Isn’t that, by their illogic, also holy?
I have drunk whiskey until I vomited into a sewer grate while a man ten years my senior rubbed my back and cooed “I like you because you’re not like other girls” in my ear. I have filled a bathtub with apple cider vinegar because I heard it rebalances your pussy and I needed that control back. I have broken a boy’s ankles and told him he needs to crawl back because he threatened someone I love. I have run away from beasts in forests I should not have been in with a person I should not have gotten in the car with. I have starved myself. I have cut myself. I have ignored all of my body’s warning signs and let people inside me who have called me a monster and told me they will write my callout post themselves if I abandon them. I am an amnesiac and a survivor and I have hurt people. I’ve dropped out of college and I’ve spread nasty rumors and I’ve apologized profusely for both.
I have been ludicrously unhappy.
You cannot take my transsexuality away for it.
Let me tell you something. Hormones and surgery aren’t going to make you happy, it’s true. Not on their own, they won’t. You’re still entitled to them. That’s right, I said “entitled.” You are entitled to transsexuality. You are entitled to the processes by which your body might look and feel a little bit more manageable. A little less torturous to be in. I don’t care if you’re one of those annoying, self-hating people who like to direct message me from time to time saying I make you feel insecure, because I “pass” and you feel like you never will. You’re still entitled to this shit. You still need to try. You’re going to die. You’re going to grow up and die and rot or burn. This is your only chance to be you. I say this because you might believe in reincarnation, so “YOLO” is out of the question, but the next time around, you’re not you anymore. You’re something else. Be you, now.
Here’s the story of my life and also yours. We are born into a sick world. We do our best. We are often unhappy. Sometimes we have trouble getting out of bed. We laugh a lot. We are loved even when we don’t feel like it. Sometimes we realize years after the fact that we have been loved, that we wasted it, and it stings. It aches. We look in the mirror and we don’t understand how perfect we are because the world we live in has a vested interest in making us aware of our lack. We want. We crave. We need. We get and we give. We make mistakes. We are forgiven. Sometimes we forgive. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we avenge. We don’t ask enough questions. We aren’t asked enough questions. We try to forge connections. Some stick. The ones that stick make us who we are. We lose the people we love. It hurts. We grieve. We die. We leave.
from Stagtown on Webtoon
There are brief and salient moments where everything clarifies. If we’re lucky or we work at it, we get to feel deeply. But even if we never “aspire” to profundity, even if we want the most ordinary, mundane life imaginable, we are suffused with some kind of life-spark. Call it whatever you want. Call it God or your higher self or the unbearable triteness of being. But I’m calling it now—you want to do something to make your life more yours. Your pitiful, beautiful, imperfect, disgusting, wild and heartbreaking life. Your body. Your body. Your body. You’re going to live. We both are. So if you’re looking for a sign, this is it. Take HRT with me. Fuck everyone who says this isn’t going to make you happy. It probably won’t. But it might make it easier to do more of what makes you happy, in the words of that estranged artist and his brother. It might make these old bones of yours feel like good bones. Feel like a house. Maybe even a home.
Coz, see, I’m not looking for people who are far away from me now. When someone looks at me who wants to touch me and I want to touch them, too, I look back. My whole Instagram isn’t selfies anymore, or “lonelys,” as the comedian Sebastian Maniscalco once called them. There’s someone else on the other end of the camera now, and I don’t search comments for affirmation. And it’s not a hundred percent fixed, of course it isn’t. For example, lately my hands haven’t felt like my own. Even now, even as I write this. There’s this weird senseless sensation in them. I see them moving across the keyboard in my peripheral vision. I hear the clack of the scissor-switch keys. I glance down and think these are ostensibly mine, but even my arms are foreign. Long twigs with little mittens attached, like a snowman someone forgot to kick down that is now possessed and coming for the village. And I don’t like growing facial hair, at least not right now. I shave my face every three days and I bought Paco Rabanne’s INVICTUS aftershave a couple weeks ago because I was shaving so much, and it all sort of feels like I’m buying accessories for a character or a doll or something, not myself. Also, I have insomnia.
But I’m here.
I know I’m here in a way I didn’t know it before. I know I’m here for sure. I’m here and so are you.
I do my T shots every Tuesday and my estradiol suppositories Tuesdays and Fridays. Come on in. The water’s fine.