Neither Here Nor There
At seventeen, I half-supposed my secret
wrongfulness might heal or normalize if I could turn, by alchemy, into a girl. Would D. have wrestled me
to nakedness if he could squeeze plump virgin breasts between his hands, instead of shoving me away one afternoon to hide his fierce erection?
That night-reverting to my dress-up episodes, pre-puberty, when I’d paraded in my grandma’s hats and pumps-I locked my bedroom door
and draped a sheet around my face. I fantasized enravishment by Darcy at high tea or rape by Grandcourt in a boat at dawn. Arousal overwhelmed me
like a hot tsunami: surmounting wave, explosive foam, then salts of self-disgust. That fall, when D. went back to college in the South, the urge to change
my stripes just ebbed away. I accepted who I thought I was, a lumpen nerd in male-ish form.
But underneath, in the soul’s oblivious tarn, a covert
river rose, then carried me, unknowingly
at first and then unwillingly, at last with buoyant thrill- part-hoy, part-girl-to a leather bar in far west
Chelsea called the Spike, where studs and queens of many genders jostled. I floated there-
on a sea of horniness and sour beer-cruising warily
as newbies must-while bearded seals and otters circled in the dark, eyes peeled for a guileless abalone they could pry apart with lust.
MALCOLM FARLEY
