TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

Things have gotten pretty serious between my virtual girlfriend and I. We Gchat roughly forty hours a week and text on the weekends and she sent me an adorable drawing of the two of us with our three future children, Rocket and Panda, who she will gestate, and Sushi, who we will adopt from an undecided East Asian nation. I returned her romantical mailing with my own—a mixed CD and a love letter that went something along the lines of, I want to make out with you and buy you things with other peoples’ money. This is how serious it is: Virtual Girlfriend (VG) came out to her parents. Frank, Betty, she said, I’m gay on the Internet. Frank and Betty may have been a little confused because they are slightly older than average and may not be entirely sure what the Internet is, but I guess they got the point, which is that their daughter likes to put her head in other girls’ laps.

So, in honor of my dear sugar bitch VG, today’s episode is all about tearing down that closet door. I realized I’ve alluded to my own coming out in previous posts, but here’s the story, real talk style….

I had a friend growing up who was obviously a boy. I mean, she was a girl, but she looked like a boy. This didn’t really change as we got older. She always had really short hair and was built like a guy. Very handsome. I realized at some point that she was probably a dyke but we never talked about it. I also remember thinking that I was really glad that I wasn’t like her, that I wasn’t a dyke. Just like parents who think that their son’s life will be difficult because he likes to shop at Banana Republic and bend over for guys who shave their chests, I didn’t want my life to be difficult. My life was already difficult. I was sixteen. Life is difficult for everyone at sixteen, especially for androgynous boy/girls in a school where the mascot is a Confederate army general. I was glad the gay disease wasn’t something else I had to worry about catching. My butch friend didn’t come out until after high school, but no one was surprised. What was surprising was that a lot of my other friends also came out after high school. We never talked about girls. We may rarely have kissed boys, but we talked about them the same way all teenage girls do. Turns out we just had to leave the vast hell of a small town to be who we are.

I made out with boys for a while in college, but anytime I found myself looking at the curve of some woman’s hip, I held my boyfriend’s hand tighter and told myself that I just really appreciated beauty. There was no way I was gay. I mean look, I’m holding hands with a boy! But then I met A—, and, along with making me crazy, she made me gay.

My friends at school were unfazed when I came out to them. My brother and sister were equally flapless. I was the only girl in Little League. Of course I’m gay. I did not, however, want to tell my parents. This wasn’t because I thought they would be upset—my parents would be more upset if I married a Republican or became a youth pastor—but because telling your parents you’re gay means telling your parents that you aren’t just emotionally and mentally gay, you’re also gay with other gay girls. Like, naked gay. I didn’t even tell my parents when I got my period. I definitely didn’t want to tell them that I was a sexually active person. You know how weird and terrible it is to think about your parents having sex? Think about how much worse it is for them to think about you having sex. You’re their little girl. You sat on their laps and giggled when they tickled you and cried when they spanked you for starting a small and completely manageable fire in the neighbor’s yard. And now you’re telling them that you not only have sex, you have the kind of sex that won’t give them grandkids no matter how hard you try. Not a conversation I really wanted to have.

About a month after A— and I got together, we drove from Asheville to the Outer Banks for a romantical weekend. Before we could get there, however, we were rear-ended by a dump truck on I-40 and crashed into a construction barrier. The air bags popped. The windshield shattered. Traffic was stopped for hours. The car was totaled. We went to the hospital and got prescriptions for completely unnecessary painkillers and stayed at a nearby friend’s house that night and borrowed her car the next day so we could get to the beach and back home. While we were at the pharmacy collecting our completely unnecessary painkillers, my sister called. She happened to be visiting our parents that weekend and said that our mom knew I was homo and was really upset. Like tears upset. Like, what-if-you-had-died-before-we-talked-about-this upset. I got that sinking stomach thing right away and started screaming that I was an orphan as of right now, this very second, no longer a member of my very own nuclear family just because I’m a big gay, fated to a Christmas alone with afternoon movies and Chinese takeout.

It was a hard weekend. A— and I were still freaked out about the wreck. We weren’t farther than arms-length away from each other for three days. When she was in bathroom I waited outside the door just in case she got sucked into the toilet. But it wasn’t just the whole near-death thing that freaked us out. It was the conversation I would soon have to have with my mom, a conversation I would rather have with my cellmate than my mother, a conversation A— also hadn’t had with her mother yet, a conversation that would make everything real. Alas, I like my mother and was still on her insurance, so I at was also a conversation that had to happen. I avoided her pleading messages until we got back from the beach and popped a few of the completely unnecessary pain killers and drank a few completely necessary beers and sat on my porch with A—, holding her hand like we were trying not to get torn apart by a tornado. The conversation went exactly like this:

Me: Who told you, my brother or my sister?

Mazog: No one. You’re father has gaydar.

And while I do think that my father’s gaydar is probably better than average because he kind of walks on his tiptoes, I suspect the big giveaway was less my hair cut and more the way A— and I interacted with each other. I had taken A— to my parents’ house one afternoon to borrow their canoe. I hadn’t done this with any of my other friends. All my parents knew about most of my friends was that they littered cigarette butts on my front porch and wiped with coffee filters because we never had any toilet paper at my house. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way we were with each other. Not touchy and not fawning and not overtly together, but still together, like there was a string that connected us and only us. The string, of course, broke. But I’m still gay. That’s not going to break.

And so, welcome to the family, VG. Frank and Betty will get over it when they meet me.

Following directions isn’t really my thing and I’m not about to share my bedroom with fifty other idiots, so, barring an uprising by the Federation for the Advancement of Gays and Gayelles (F.A.G.G.), enlisting in the military is about as likely as that time five minutes ago when Sean Penn friended me on Facebook. Regardless, I accompanied my roommate Small Fry to the recruiting office in Durham recently. It was an exercise in cheek-biting for me: it’s hard not to laugh at military recruiters when you are so fundamentally opposed to what they stand for (e.g. obedience, nationalism, khaki) and what they do (e.g. kill, depose, Skype) and know you are wasting the time they could spend coercing other young people to sign over their autonomy. They likely had just as little hope of signing us based on appearance alone. It’s not that we’re obviously dykes, which we are (despite national policy, gayism is probably recognized as a benefit in the armed forces. Would you rather be defended by Bull Dyke Barbie or Malibu Barbie?), we just don’t look like the kind of people who would join the army. We look like the kind of people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn or the kind of people who talk shit about people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn but still kind of like it. But there we were.

The recruiters’ office itself isn’t what I expected. When you walk in, there’s no one to welcome you with stars and stripes and patriotic songs, ready to salute you in the right direction. Left for Marines, right for Army, around back for Blackwater. Instead, you just wander around until you find the branch you’re looking for. There were two recruiters in the Air Force office. They didn’t try to sell us. They didn’t talk about the army of one or the benefits or the camaraderie or the honor in fighting for your country after that big September thing. They just handed us forms to fill out and left us alone. Although I might have given them my sister’s social security number and an ex’s phone number, I was mostly honest on the paperwork. Have I been arrested? Yes, but it was just a misunderstanding. I wasn’t really trying to pass myself off as a forty-two-year-old Canadian woman with a taste for Bartles & James and the charges were dismissed after I gave the judge a mani/pedi. You’re also supposed to list all the drugs you’ve done and the number of times you’ve done them. If I actually wanted to earn my pilot’s wings, I would have lied, but because I was more interested on getting out before happy hour than being fitted for a uniform, I wrote the truth. It’s not like I’ve ever traded my body for a crack pebble or anything, but I went to college. I wore Birkenstocks and rolled one-handed joints on the way to school. And, besides being the inevitable gateway to excessive napping, weed was never really a problem for me. When I stopped smoking, I didn’t even really think about it. I just stopped. And that’s what I told the military recruiter. Look, brother, there’s nothing wrong with smoking a few trees. It’s Of The Earth, my friend. A gift from our planet to our minds. He looked at me like I’m John Waters trying to get into the police academy and said he didn’t think the Air Force was an appropriate fit.

When Small Fry first told me that she was thinking about joining the military, I changed the subject (Look! Boobs!) and waited for her to put this terrible idea to bed. But she didn’t put it to bed. She talked about detonating bombs and wearing a tailored uniform and never cooking again. She made her hands into guns and shot everyone who walked by the window. This is what I need to gain discipline, she said. This will make me grow up. Her thinking is stupid, like waiting for your power to get cut off because then you’ll be forced to start paying your bills on time, and yet, I kind of get it. There is no discipline in our home. The two of us live in a tree house world. We try to take the recycling out but only manage to get the cans out of the pantry and into the living room. We create imaginary futures for ourselves. We’re going to move to San Francisco and live in bunk beds and have a bunny that hops behind us everywhere we go or maybe a fairy who hovers by our shoulders. Or maybe someone will recognize the appeal of two nearing-thirty girls who sit around wearing eye patches and gypsy masks, getting up every once in a while to practice chest-bumping before resuming our Facebook sentry. Yes, that’s what we need: someone to find us and and love us and give us a reality TV show.

I left Small Fry with the recruiters and wandered around, thinking about what do to now that this option that was never really an option isn’t ever going to be an option. Med school? Americorps? Teaching English in Korea until the economy recovers and we can get back to the lives we think we deserve: comfortable lives, exciting lives, full lives, mornings that don’t start with trying to think of a reason to get out of bed, not finding one, and closing the blinds and dreaming for a few more hours. Being in that office, walking past rooms where people were signing the papers because they want to or because they have to, some excited, some scared, all making real decisions, big decisions, decisions that will influence the course of their lives now and forever—people who are, really, just like us—made me think there might be no fairy and no benefactor and no one else to make us grow up. Are we past the age when it’s acceptable to walk around town barefoot with our pants rolled up because we feel like playing Tom and Huck? This is the point—out of school, underemployed, desperate enough to consider the military—where you realize that you’re on your own. That’s where the military comes in. Sign here and stop thinking. Do their push-ups, make their beds, polish their door-knobs, call them sir and write your girl back home. Your inability to make decisions won’t matter anymore. It will, in fact, make you a better solider. There is some solace in being a robot. I understand this, and part of me wishes I could get over my ethical reservations and my unwillingness to take orders and my past life as a stoner and my unshakable belief that things will work out, maybe not for everyone, but for me. Because what if it doesn’t? What if this is all there is, looking for ways to adulthood, wishing you were one of the thousands of people who sign up, who put their fate in the hands of others, who follow orders. Maybe we all want to to sacrifice our autonomy, not to an organization run on obedience, but to a fate we think we deserve. We are no different than anyone else in that building. We just think we are.

When I was twenty years old and more in love than I have ever been in love and maybe even more in love than is possible for someone of my cardiac size to love more than once in life, my period turned into an acidic monster. I’d never been much of a light days kind of menstruator, but something happened that year to give me the bowel-twisting cramps that make a hysterectomy numbed by bag of frozen peas seem like a better option than dealing with that shit for another week. What happened? My size twelve pain may have had something to do with a change in lifestyle—I went from being a real serious athlete to being a real serious porch-sitter—but I suspect it had less to do with the sedentary lifestyle of the marijuana abuser and more to do with embracing my gayness.

Any woman who has lived, worked, or changed a light bulb with another woman knows what I’m talking about—it’s something to do with the moon and wolves and tides or something—but when you spend a bunch of hand ticks with other ladies, your blood drip gets all wonky. In my case, six years ago I spent every waking and non-waking moment with my inaugural girlfriend. I was unbearably, unsustainably butterflied to be alive and to be gay because I woke up every morning with a woman who looked like a half-Cuban Princess Di without the crazy eyes. Every morning I looked down on this woman—my girlfriend!—sleeping on her side and on my arm, which I couldn’t feel but didn’t mind because a numb arm was nothing when the rest of me was so golden, and reached over her with my living arm to get a joint off my beside table, which I then lit and smoked with one hand, which later proved to be good practice for texting while driving. I was happy.

However, it only took a few weeks of bumping fussies for my XX chromosomes to get seriously out of good. My cramps had always been a bitch, but a dozen Alleve and a few bong hits for breakfast usually muted the screams long enough to shower and get dressed. But now my emotional state right before the blood clots flowed perched somewhere betwixt outpatient and padded walls. This was a problem. I depleted my monthly allocation of tears in three days, yet was completely unable to recognize why I wanted to take an forever nap in a refrigerator box. This lasted for the duration of our relationship.

The strangest part of the girlfriend/girlfriend menstrual cycle when I was with A— was that we never bled together. There is something wrong with this. I’ve cycled with housemates, friends, co-workers, bartenders. My roommate and I talk about alpha-ing each other every month. She blames me when her blood ocean is off calendar, I blame her when mine is. It’s a constant struggle for period dominance. With A— and I, the struggle was never resolved. Four years and no cohesion. Two women PMSing at once is bad, girlfriends PMSing for literally half their relationship is really bad. As soon as I would calm down and get my head out of the oven, A— would push me out of the way and stick hers in.

Also around the time we got together, I became a night bleeder. I had never been a blood squirter before. In the seven years previous to meeting A—, I had bled through the sheets maybe once or twice and I haven’t at all since we gave up. But all of a sudden we were waking in the the morning in a sticky red sea, like Jack Woltz after his horse head slumber party. She was always patient, my girlfriend, always helped me wash the sheets and flip the mattress, and, like the mother of a six-year-old who may get exasperated that her kid keeps wetting the bed, she knew I wanted this to happen even less than she did and loved me despite the washing bill and the ruined sheets.

The period thing was, at times, touching. When a girl is in bed, cursing her ovaries and praying to wake up to a change in anatomy, you bring her tea and a hot water bottle and massage her lower back and when her mood swings from crying to screaming to punching, you tell her you love her.

A— went to shower one morning while I was still in bed. I got up before she was clean and dry and walked naked and blind from our bedroom to the kitchen to make coffee. I am bat-like without my cornea shirkers so I didn’t notice the red drips on our kitchen floor until A— got out of the shower and saw I had tracked my own blood across the kitchen and back again. We laughed and mopped the floor and forgot about it, unworried and uncaring because their was nothing terrible about my her blood or mine.

When A— and I broke up a few years later, she sent a box of leftovers to my new home across the country. Artifacts of when times were good—postcards, notes we left on each others’ pillows, letters we wrote when distance kept us apart. Among the refuse was something I hadn’t seen before—a poem she had written. I remember a line from the poem, just a fragment. Drops of blood from coffee pot to shower. It’s still in the box she sent. I could pull it out, read the rest, thumb through the past, happy that I knew electricity, sad that I may not again, but I’ll keep it there, at the bottom of its cardboard cage, full of blood and love and the memory of what was.

We are America’s smartest city, so says the Daily Beast. Precisely, this is a “university hub, including two of the nation’s elite schools (Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and those schools led to one of the nation’s great technology incubators (Research Triangle). On top of that, Raleigh, as the state’s capital, attracts engaged political minds, as well.”

In this not-so-scientastic study, the fifty-five largest metropolitan areas across this grey nation were assessed on the basis of education and intellectual climate, with factors like the number of non-fiction books read, the percentage of the population with iPhones, and rates of political engagement as gauged by Obama bumper stickers. It’s no surprise that we topped the list, what with being the home of two of the nation’s elite schools and all. I personally feel pretty good about failing out of an elite university, although the only reason I applied to the School of Information and Library Science at UNC was because the students in that program were always at the bar. It’s definitely better than being kicked out of the University of Phoenix, the first institute of higher learning to sever our relationship.

Here’s the thing about living in the smartest trifecta in the country: when you only buy the Times so the neighbors are impressed with your recycling and are constantly nodding through conversations about the progress of someone’s PhD, Minutes Sixty-Seven through Sixty-Nice in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but are really wondering if the bartender is gay, you feel decidedly medium. You’ve always considered yourself smarter than average, if only because you got your driver’s license on the first try, but you’re now realizing that you only got into AP Biology because your mom was the principal.

Still, I always wonder if these people really are smart. Their language is so dense that they could be full of shit and I’d have no idea. Use terms like, “ontology” and “meta” and I’ll assume you deserve as MacArthur Genius Grant, and so, when you live here, your ego suffers. The result of this is that you both consider everyone else an asshole and become one yourself. Carrboro is across the tracks (literally) from the University of North Carolina, and, while a large percentage of the population of Carrboro either attended UNC or moved here after grad school at Columbia to work at UNC, there is a decidedly town versus gown thing going on here. No, I don’t live in Chapel Hill, I live in Carrboro. I am an asshole about it. When I was in school, I constantly felt judged. I am obviously a proponent of bumping fussies, I have a dyke mullet and tattoos, and my backpack looks like what people in the ’70s thought the future was going to look like, which is actually very hip in parts of the country as well as Northern Europe, but makes people think I’m wearing a jet pack and flying between classrooms. Being on campus makes me feel like I’m at the nerdy table in the cafeteria again, and so I glare at everyone who tries to make eye contact with me. Fuck you. Fuck you and your ‘Carolina Girls Best in the World’ shorts.

It’s not just on campus either. I feel the same way when I’m anywhere in Chapel Hill. People think I’m stuck up because I am. I sit around with my friends and judge. “Look at that skinny bitch. Someone needs to eat a burger.” “Funny how that boy holding hands with his girlfriend has gay face. I wonder how many fingers fit in his ass.” Why invite this negativity into my life? Because I have class anxiety. When I worked at Whole Foods, I felt like everyone assumed I was some bottom-feeding townie, which I am, but one with a college degree from an accredited university, damn it.

Carrboro people don’t really have vacation homes, but we do have adorable mill houses on half-acre lots. We are an educated people, an upper-middle class people, a people with baby bjorns and co-op memberships and hipster dads, but we are not Chapel Hill people. We may root for the same basketball team and attend the same universities, but we are not Chapel Hill people. We may be a part of the smartest area in the country, but we are across the tracks. We are assholes, but we aren’t those assholes.