“Men and women are Images, hanging ghosts in the air, faces painted on the wall, masks no face can enter, the rules of a game getting explained over and over again to everyone and getting explained by getting played. They are images, but they are not immaterial (nothing is immaterial): they determine who produces what, who lives what life, who is punished for breaking what rules, who can be raped with impunity, who can be beaten with impunity, who can be killed with impunity.”
..One time, Xylea said, a client was supposed to go down on me and cum on my feet, but he kept trying to fuck me, and so I started going on a long rant about Aileen Wuornos (the lore of Aileen Wuornos, the litany of her crimes, crimes like a Dadaist poem, a poem written in the flesh about the goddess Medusa and about men and about the abyss) and then when he tried to stick his dick in me I stabbed him, and he looked up at me like what the fuck, and I was like why do you think I was telling you about Aileen fucking Wuornos, retard?
..I didn’t kill him, she said, but I’ve probably killed someone.
..In those days, she’d come over for the weekend and she’d hang out naked on my couch and we’d talk late into the night and watch TV: a public-access-type call-in show featuring a man in a Gecko suit practicing unlicensed therapy in a way that created a simulacrum of nirvana, Bojack, a documentary about an autistic Redditor who raped his senile mom, Ben Shapiro talking cluelessly about tradwives (the autism of Ben Shapiro, the night-and-day difference between choosing and not choosing one’s own slavery, how in the future fascist hyper-patriarchy we would be fine as tradwives, Xylea probably more than me, she could take that kink to extremes beyond the mirror of fantasy and reality), shows about Chernobyl, about the Holocaust, about Waco and Jonestown, a musical with Dolly Parton running a brothel in West Texas, Cruising, Barbarella, all three Fifty Shades movies, etc.
..She told me she had endometriosis and therefore more testosterone than most girls, though shewas very femme, and that’s why she fucked like a guy, she said, why she gravitated towards sexaddicts and nymphos, a trust fund drug dealer boyfriend who’d been a transfem bottom in a traphouse when she met him, but she’d turned him into a Dom. I said I didn’t believe, personally, in the distinction between gender and sex, that my sex had never been male and especially ceased to be so after taking hormones, that being trans was more about the soul than the body anyway, the soul reaching out for its ideal body, being trans was, like the name Leila, about the transmigration of souls and angelic sexuality and about death, too: a drop of semen or blood transmitted in a night of pure oblivion.
..She’d take a bath at my place because they only had communal showers at her SRO. I’d sit on the bathroom floor and look at her body. You’re so beautiful, I said. I know, is all she said back. And: I was lucky to be born in this form. Once, there was a trail of blood running down her thigh, down the outside of the tub, specks all over the tile. I reached out to touch her thigh, mesmerized, as if it was the first time that I’d ever seen a girl menstruating.
..I’m falling in love with her, I think. That wasn’t what I meant to happen but what we mean to happen rarely ever happens, never happens. By the time I realize it, it’s too late.
..You know what you should do?, she said, one day when I was feeling particularly bleak. You should drive to a different state and find a small town, a peaceful little park in a small town, and sit down on a bench in that park, the same bench every day for a year, and tell the same story to a different stranger every day, or to many strangers. Tell them the story of your life: the story of betrayal and violation, of heartbreak and psychosexual sadism, of the most ineffable crimes, the most phantasmagoric psychopaths, tell them about hometown Nazis and the Nazis of the forests of Ukraine, tell them about the love of your life who ran off with your childhood best friend, tell them about every moment of rejection and abject shame, every time you got the shit beat out of you, literally or metaphorically, tell them about South America and about the civil wars you witnessed that no one remembers in which millions died, about historical atrocities contained in the amniotic memory of the world, tell them your most intense and absurd kinks and your most feverish nights of fucking, tell them about your family, the sordid paradise of childhood, tell them about delirium tremens, tell them about the nightmare of living in the wrong body, tell them about the books you wrote, about the girls you fell in love with who didn’t love you back, or who loved you back in the wrong way, tell them about your friend who was killed by a cop one night for no reason and the friend who died choking on his own lungs in a foreign country, tell them about 9/11, but 9/11 as if it were a lost porno from the 1980s, tell them Kanye West was president, tell them about the divine, tell them about sex-crazed angels, about the worst movies you’ve ever seen, about the sea, but as if you were making it up, the sea that is, just as all the planets in the solar system are made up, and astrology is made up, and love is made up, and fucking is made up, and gods are made up, and communism is made up, and evil is made up, and gender is made up, and our faces are made up, and our memories are made up, the only thing that’s real is death, but not the death we think we know, the death on the other side of the mirror, the death on the other side of death, etc. I did this once, for one year when I was homeless in the Haight, taking acid every day throughout the day, by choice and against my will, talking endlessly to endless strangers, and by the end of that year I’d said everything there was to say, to anyone there was to say it to, and I was squeezed dry, every last drop of trauma and identity had been wrung from me, as if I’d slit my own throat, as if I’d provided a refutation of infinity and of the unconscious, as if my life were a book that had come to its end by being, not written, but unwritten, torn page by page, scattered to amnesia, the wind.
..At the end of one of our weekends together, her boyfriend came to pick her up. He was a white guy with dreads, balding, good-looking in a repulsive way. I remembered the story she told me about how he’d had thirteen dreads, his lucky number, and to get back at him for some slight one night she’d cut one of them off (I don’t have a God complex, she said, I have a Dante complex: I’m a creature of commensurate revenge). He’ll never be able to regrow it, she said, so I felt kind of bad. Almost immediately he started treating her like shit, talking down to her, making fun of her for things that didn’t really make sense. She seemed to like it, and I knew it was part of their kink routine, but still, I didn’t like it, or him. He complimented my tattoos, and showed me his. So you’re the neck tat bf, I said. He didn’t get it, but he got that I was making fun of him. Still, he seemed to want me to like him. I don’t know why people like that, insecure lumpen with intellectual pretensions, bottoms in denial, always want me to like them, but I never give them what they want, and that’s probably part of it. It became clear pretty quickly that he was MAGA (commie crust punk sex worker gf, MAGA trust fund drug dealer bf), but not in the usual retarded way, in the more disturbing, insurrectionary way, as if he and people like him alone were able to see through the superstructure of society, and that at the end of the day everything was tending towards an Armageddon between the state and an armed white populace, which may or may not be true, but it’s one of those prophecies that misses the point. He started talking about Palestine, Ohio, various eco-carcinogenic conspiracies against heartland America, the decoupling from the U.S. dollar, the sinister arrest of Trump, how it was only a matter of time before civil war kicked off. Those white yokels, I said, are in entirely over their heads and are completely incapable of replacing the state which they’ve always relied on, going back to the founding of this idiotic country, in a hypocritical, sadomasochistic pact, like children who hurl their own shit at their indulgent Mommies. You’re talking about the U.S. dollar as if white militias could enforce the subordination of the Global South, but you guys aren’t capable of that, anymore than you’re capable of running an electrical grid or providing clean drinking water or not killing yourself with fentanyl or drinking yourself to death or rotting your brains with the most inane conspiracy theories. Xylea seemed to be realizing for the first time that her boyfriend was on the right, I guess she thought he’d always been joking, and besides his family was close with the Clintons (cryptically, in the middle of my conversation with her boyfriend, she turned to me and said, I like to fuck my friends, but my friends can’t handle it). Later, when I told Heidi about him, she asked me if he was a sociopath. I don’t know, I said, but maybe. I’m just worried, she said, because there’s a tendency people who are oppressed have to become fascinated with sociopaths, to invite them into our lives, thinking we’re in control, but we’re not actually in control. Maybe that’s what’s happening with Xylea, I said, but personally, I’m immune to the charms of sociopaths, to gangsters and criminals, I’ve never romanticized them, in the same way I never romanticized charismatic communist leaders or serial killers with ten-inch dicks, I see right through them, violence, I said, is ultimately boring, it’s a cope, the game of power is a game of faggots, a game played by faggots, Valerie Solanas understood that, but fuck her, too, to be honest, because I did used to fall for girls who resembled Valerie, the angry schizo, but in the end they always cut you, too.
..Xylea and her boyfriend left after midnight and I went to bed and drank a cup of tea and made myself cum and lay in the dark thinking about her, missing her body besides mine.
..You have a tendency, Heidi said, to fall in love with the archetypal side of girls: the pretty cis girl who can move weightlessly through the world, or the glamorous and traumatized whore, half psycho half-saint. Yes, and also I fall in love with the shadow of myself in another, and also with the flesh and blood being in front of me, or, with a carnal apparition, a hallucinatory blood. Touch me and I melt. I’m the easiest trans girl to take advantage of because I live entirely in the land of myth, of dreams, and also it turns me on to get taken advantage of, so it’s not like I don’t know what I’m getting into. One evening, at my place, Rebecca justified her cheating on me for years and the slow doom of our relationship by saying that we have different roles in “the revolution” (fuck the revolution, I thought). According to her, I’m an artist, a shaman, a militant of the unconscious and of our collective nightmares, and she’s a…I don’t know, a Stalinist official biding her time, yelling at the NGO on her computer screen.
..The fact remains that I’m always the one getting hurt, getting burned. A certain pattern to my reality that took form long ago, some intrauterine programming. “Masochism is addictive, femininity is addictive, women are the most fucked-up drug of all.” –an estrogen junkie…
..As I grow older, I lose my revolutionary fervor, while becoming more of a revolutionary in my body, in the molecular structure of my existence. I fuck men for money, and I fall in love with women. I begin to take a Gnostic view of politics and the world. It doesn’t really matter to me that white men have run the world for hundreds of years and probably always will, because the world is ephemeral, it hardly touches me, I can perceive its mortality in a way that those who believe in its appearances are simply incapable of, I long ago gave up trying to enter its illusory, its ineluctable image. I can survive anything, I tell myself. Though of course I won’t, none of us survives anything: not even violence, not even charisma, not even appearances, not even money, not even sex, not even death, not even men, not even women, not even falling in love (especially, especially not that)…