Antoinette, For Example, by Cooper Lee Bombardier
“I’d almost spit my spirit-gummed mustache off when someone called me a drag king”
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Everybody was so nonchalant about gender except for me. Perhaps that should have been a big blaring neon sign that I WAS TRANS in blue and red tubing that blurs to purple in the rain, blinking above the edifice of my obvious, open 24/7 problem with gender. That's why I'd get so pissed I'd almost spit my spirit-gummed mustache off when someone called me a drag king. Why the ratcheted-tight, breath-harnessing ace bandage squeezing my rib cage always felt like a referendum from God rather than a temporary means to the end of boobs.
Take Antoinette, for example. We are introduced at a party in the third floor flat of Javier and Chuy, two gay boys we each adore. The Castro is thumping away just around the corner like the heart of a chased gazelle, and the fog hangs low, swaddles the streets, and now we can remember that we live right next to the sea. Chuy introduces me to Antoinette and she barnacles herself on to me, having started the party a couple hours sooner. Her forearm hangs casual through my elbow and across my forearm like I've belonged to her my whole life; easy, familiar, affectionate. It sparks up where her smooth skin meets the top of my arm. It's the mid-1990s so naturally she is wearing a latex dress as tight and red as a birthday balloon and really, she does this outfit justice. Her lips are painted red to match, her pale skin, black eyes and hair pop in contrast to the dress, and when she sits on the stuffed arm of the chair she has just spooned me into without effort, the dress makes a basketball-court-sneaker-squeak between the upholstery and her ass. She swings a leg across my lap which fastens me into the seat like the gate to a rollercoaster car and she sips the drink she has not spilled a drop of this entire time.
Antoinette may be drunk, but she exudes poise. Me, I am as dressed up as I tend to get: favorite embroidered western shirt and unwashed 501s rough as sandpaper and big black boots worn-down in the heels. I dress like a white stereotype of something I never was. An ubiquitous ball-cap curved and salt-greasy shoved down over my brow to hide the constant surprise and innocence of my face. My mid-twenties face telegraphing out how I was a girl playing at being a man, how badly I wanted to evolve into an adult. If I pulled my hat brim down just a tiny bit lower it might hide my hunger for the attention of women, how I long to be claimed, to be adored despite my affliction of butchness, my smell of other. The seriousness of my gender stiffened my gait, leveled my shoulders to square, made me look behind myself on the streets. Then Antoinette's red-encased form pools down on to me in the chair and her hand slips up the back of my neck beneath the fringe of curls that escapes my hat. Her fingers furrow rows in my hair and I feel this everywhere in a body I spend a lot of time outside of. The party swirls around us, glasses and bottles, cadences of laughter and loud talking and three-fourths of the attendees trying to squeeze into the comforting yellow crush of the kitchen and someone flips the records and Antoinette and I float alone on an iceberg in the middle of the living room. She's telling me a funny story about her beloved but strict Korean parents, and I wonder what it would be like to be worthy of her. She seems so whole, untainted. I imagine my damage like a kite digging its point in the grass, something that even all of her happiness would never manage to hoist aloft. The painted petals of her lips graze my ears so close I can smell her lipstick. I want to taste it on my teeth.
Out of nowhere Antoinette says: when I am like fifty years old I will totally transition to male. Why not? I'd like to spend half of my life as a woman, and the rest as a man. I think that'd be interesting. She looks at my face, inert as a medicine ball, and she laughs. Not at me. She's not a dick, I am sure of this. But the sheer depth of her laugh, the way it travels from somewhere far below her diaphragm, the way it beaches our ice-floe onto the shores of the living room carpet and everyone at the party remembers we are there, the joy of it; I know it's teaching me something I am not yet ready to understand. I lay a slip of paper here, bookmark it in my memory.
A couple of weeks from now, we'll go out on a date. She'll treat me to a Doc Watson concert. Antoinette shares my love of Americana. She'll drive us in a 1968 Mustang the color of sweet cream. When I compliment her car, she'll tell me it's a gift from her slave; her most regular client. She is cheerful about everything, and I'll feel exposed by the lightness of her. On our second date she'll come over to the apartment in the Mission where I am couch-surfing and hang out with me and watch G.I. Jane on VHS. My dog will be recuperating from getting spayed and I won't want to leave her because she'll be nauseated from being put under. She'll be curled up in a ball on her bed to hide her shaved and sutured belly. We'll watch Demi Moore sweating, doing crazy sit-ups and push ups. Shaving her head. It will be kind of hot.
Antoinette will say the movie inspires her, gives her ideas for scenes at work. There, Antoinette is the boss, called Mistress by the men who pay; but the first time, naked beneath me, she'll call me daddy. And I'll think: I don't know about all that. It will surprise me because I'll feel as fragile and stitched-together as my dog. I don't even have a place to live.
The party winds down and Antoinette insists that I get her home. The boys hug us and wink at me. I catch her arm as her high-heel stabs into and snags the carpet of the stairs before she slips all the way down. I fasten my leather jacket and helmet on to her, cocoon her in my too-big armor. She straddles my bike behind me, drunk and listing, not easy in the latex. I hope I don't get pulled over, helmetless, as I drive her to her apartment door seven blocks away. Antoinette's arms coil around my belly and she sings and sways as I roll through the streets made unfamiliar and mysterious by the blanket of fog. I see her through her door, her red lips stick to mine, briefly. She starts to pull me in. I don't want to be alone but I want to face another even less. I turn away back down into the low gloom, the headlight of my motorcycle punches a small hole of clarity through the damp veil hanging thick in the streets around me.
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Header image courtesy of Karim Hamid. To view a gallery of his paintings at NAILED, go here.
Cooper Lee Bombardier is a writer and visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. His work appears in several publications and anthologies, most recently in CutBank, and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, and the anthology The Remedy–Essays on Queer Health Issues, (ed. Zena Sharman) from Arsenal Pulp Press. Visit him over: here.