..I took the train to Sacramento. I thought about killers and about their victims, too. I thought about how I must be the only whore and the only romantic (which is to say, the only detective) on the entire train, or at least in my compartment. Did that mean the rest of the train was full of killers, or, at least, of accomplices? I was on my way to spend the weekend with Harvey. We had a small fight before I left, because my top surgery was coming up, and I said that if I couldn’t get the surgery I’d probably kill myself, and they said that was obsessive, they were worried about me, and I said but that’s why I’m getting the surgery, so I don’t have to kill myself, so I can be happy. It took me a long time to realize that I live, more than most people, entirely by instinct, in the murky sea of my instincts (my oceanic body), and that I never weigh the pros and cons of my actions, never think deductively, never imagine the forking paths my life could take, though in retrospect those paths, those labyrinths, become objects of dread and fascination (or is it that, instead of paths, life-in-retrospect becomes nothing but a series of crumbling, hallucinatory towers, a drowned dream, a womb that’s also a grave?) My reality is my body, and the other way around. When I was younger, I thought this meant I didn’t have dreams, since I didn’t have plans, bourgeois plans, but in fact it meant I was a consummate dreamer, that I dreamt with my eyes open. I became an alcoholic for twenty years entirely in an instant, without premeditation, just like I moved to South America for no real reason, or for entirely romantic reasons, just like I let Rebecca move in with me after our first date, just like one day I started taking hormones without thinking about it. I feel bad for people who aren’t like this, like me. I feel closer to a flower, a supernova, a subway schizophrenic, than to a res cogitans, a thinking thing. On the train, I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and watched the sunset.
..Harvey had a kidney infection, and my health was fucked that weekend, too, and on a psychic level we were even worse, there was some real dark-night-of-the-soul shit going on within us and between us. We spent the day in the cemetery (where “the Swiss psychopath” John Sutter is buried) drinking McDonald’s iced coffees and crying and listening to Elliot Smith (“Elliot Smith was a revolutionary in the communist sense of the word,” I said), talking about beautiful wounded bird souls, about c-PTSD, about the ways in which we fell in love as children, about the hopelessness of our childhoods, about how they always talk about theirs and how I never bring up mine, as if I’d never had a childhood, had been formed in an inchoate place of grief and longing, about how the most sublime works of art are those that lead one to a state of impersonal grace and forgiveness, art that dissolves/absolves every dystopian timeline, art in which identity, in which form, emerges with blinding clarity only to disappear, like a wave crashing against the shores of fate, returning to the void: a murmur, a dark sea…
..Later that evening I got a call from a number saved as “little bitch” in my phone. Harvey told me to pick it up. Hi, a voice said. This is Lenin. He heard Harvey’s voice, heard them laughing in the background. Do you think we could arrange a scene where your friend encourages me to be your little sissy bitch for the evening, dress up like a slut and suck your dick? Sure, I said. But wait, did you say your name is Lenin?
..I re-saved his number as “Sissy Lenin.”
***
..Xylea’s boyfriend broke up with her when they were half-way through South Dakota. They were on their way to see his mom in Wisconsin. She called me from the road. I cried and screamed and listened to 100 gecs in his trunk last night, she said. That wasn’t the kinky trunk scene I imagined. All these years together I’ve been trying to get him to lock me up in the trunk of his car, and in the end I have to climb in on my own, to hide my own tears, muffle my own screams. Even sex fails us in the end, she said. Even trauma fails us, even repetition fails us, even the death drive fails us…
..We have to pretend to be together for his mom, she said. And also, we’re still gonna fuck while we’re on the road. It’s actually very sweet, he’s being the evil Dom I always wanted him to be, his way of saying goodbye. Last night he fucked my throat so hard I vomited everywhere, and then he made me lick up every last bit of vomit. One day you’re gonna find a Dom who can put up with your manic episodes, he told me, your anemia, your weird little stories, your autistic obsessions, your fucked-up sexual fantasies. I begged him to stay with me, to keep me in his closet as his sex slave. I told him I didn’t care if he got another girlfriend, just give me that. But apparently I’m too annoying to be a sex slave. Fuck.
..We talked on the phone for a couple hours and it was only at the end that I realized he was right there, driving the car the entire time. I imagined the infinite desolation of the Badlands, I imagined two lovers at the end of the road, I imagined the words “lumpen melancholia” written in airplane script across the blue South Dakota sky. I thought about how only a few weeks ago I’d thought I was in love with Xylea, and now not only was I not in love with her, but she was beginning to fade away into just-another image, just-another memory, just-another voice from the past. I don’t believe space and time are essentially different in that respect, and the dead are just as much no longer here as they are in a remote, inaccessible time. Limerence, too, dies off at a certain distance, when she moves to a different city or crosses a vague, a tremulous border.
..When I got off the phone with Xylea, I suddenly remembered Caroline, who until that moment had been lost in the amnesia of the last few years of my drinking, who’d come up to stay with me from L.A. even though we’d never met (that story recurs, never ends well, for me, for anyone) and I was pretty mean to her all weekend, at first because I was sick, like late-stage alcoholic sick, and then out of genuine sexual sadism, frustration with her desperate sentimentality, and she told me she loved me and wanted to stay in my closet as my sex slave, and I, too, ultimately said no. She went home. A week later she texted me that she might be pregnant. I can’t get you pregnant, I said. I want to kill myself, she said. Okay, I said. What do you want me to do about it? Remember when you asked me if I thought you were evil?, she said. I didn’t remember that, but I pretended that I did. Well, I lied. I said you weren’t. But the truth is, you’re pure fucking evil.
..I don’t believe there are good people, or evil people, or any of that. Xylea’s cynicism (which is also her generosity) is slowly infecting me: an amoral intoxication. I love art but not people, she said, though people can make good art, so there’s that. Xylea’s right. People are selfish, at the end of the day. Marx was right that everything proceeds from class interest, and Freud was right that everything proceeds from sex. It’s fine, everything’s fine: sordid, beautiful, and fine.
***
..Every man looks ridiculous when he’s getting his dick sucked. Especially when he’s in his fifties and completely bald, because when you first meet him he kind of has that hot Daddy energy, but then when you’re sucking his dick and you look up at him he looks like a big, hairless, mewling baby, his eyes shut in some ineffable idiot pleasure. It’s enough to make you want to burst out laughing, though you know you can’t, and also think, I can’t believe this guy gets to fuck me, gets to stick his dick in me. Then after he cums in your mouth and you excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to spit it out and come back he shows you a picture of his trans son, and you can tell he’s proud his kid’s a dude, he’s got swag I say, but that doesn’t mean he has any respect for the trans women he fucks, because in this case it’s femininity he hates (he’s already bitched about his ex-wife like a half-dozen times over text). When he got here he asked me, so how long have you known you’re a girl? Well, I said, I’ve always been a girl, but I transitioned like fifteen years ago (I lied). How long have you known you’re a dude?, I asked. He didn’t like that question. The first thing he said to me was also the last thing he said as he was leaving: I bet you were expecting some gross fat dude. As if he was some paragon of the male half of the species. So, like, what do you do?, I asked, after he nutted. I run a bunch of companies and I drink too much, he said. But I’m a good Dad. My ex-wife’s a bitch though, he said. So I hear, I said, from you.
***
..Hey!, a dude texts me. I’m interested. Is there a discount for a hot ex-military guy with a big cock? [grinning emoji]. Unless you’re Chris Dorner, no.
***
..My online Domme, who lives somewhere in western Europe, who plays the role of sadistic terf Mommy-Goddess better than I’ve ever seen anyone play it, who takes me to the limits of my emotional masochism (which is to say, the limits of myself), tells me, when we’re done playing, that in her spare time she likes to read the works of Walter Benjamin. I tell her that Benjamin is very dear to my heart, that I think about him almost every day, especially these days. What makes you think of him?, she asks. Apocalyptic fascism, mostly, I say. Trying to live a life in the ruins of linear time, recovering fragments, from planetary debris, of consciousness and desire…
***
..I spent the day in San Francisco, first getting my face zapped, then sitting in Union Square for three hours listening to music and flirting with a schizophrenic woman who talked to me about the demons at the United Nations, then at my surgeon’s office to go over some final things before the surgery (basically, I was like make my tits as big as you realistically can, though maybe I should have said “surrealistically,” my goal in transition, as in everything else, has never been realism). I met Envy back in Oakland for dinner before fae left for the airport to go to faer grandmother’s funeral in Phoenix (“the miserable, racist old bitch is dead, and I hope she’s in hell, since she believed in that sort of thing”). As I was settling in for the evening, this rich guy I’d been texting with invited me over to his place in the suburbs to fuck him and his hot Brazilian girlfriend. We basically want to give you a massage, suck your cock, he said. So I went over, even though I was tired, because I was hornier than I was tired, and more filled with ennui than either horny or tired. On the drive over, I thought about how I used to be nervous when I was meeting new people, and how I stopped being nervous the moment I became a whore, the moment meeting new people meant fucking them, because fucking is the easiest thing in the world, that’s the secret to not caring what other people think about you, though most people don’t know that because most people are neurotic, and that gives me an advantage, so when I show up to a new place I try to project a romantic image, an image of a glamorous demimonde prostitute from nineteenth-century Paris or 1990s Moscow, an art hoe bimbo who’s read all the books and sucked all the dicks, etc., a persona I made up which then became true through being made up, which my clients find thrilling, since they’re all repressed types, like all rich people these days (their Caligulan fantasies are born from lack, from middle-class morality, apocalyptic fomo). When I get there I’m struck by the fact that his girlfriend is like, really fucking hot, like porn hot, fake tits, ultra-femme, Brazilian hot, but also she’s about forty and kind of sophisticated, more worldly and more self-assured than the women I’m used to sleeping with. He looks like he’s in his mid to late fifties, he’s rugged and muscular and overly tan, probably attractive to women who like men like that. They’re both on molly and immediately I’m made to feel like this extreme object of desire, they look at me like I’m not even real, and she says, you’re a dream, you know that Leila. I sit between them on the couch and while he fondles my tits I ask her about the book she wrote (he’d told me she’d written a book), which she tells me a bit about, it’s about mycelial intelligence and death, naturally, it’s about how life is all over in a flash, it’s about the beautiful shit that is our bodies, what happens to our bodies when we die, it’s an anti-theological book, she’d grown up between Brazil and Sicily, two Catholic countries, though she was old converso Jewish on her mom’s side. The way she keeps saying this is all a dream, you’re a dream, our bodies are here on this Earth to manifest beauty and to mutate and to die, etc., I start getting incredibly turned on, it’s like I’m on molly, too. He starts talking about his errant youth, reading Emerson and Thoreau and Zen Buddhist texts, and about the idea of pure awareness, awareness without ego. I don’t really know what to say but it feels like I’m expected to say something, so I say that I don’t really mind the ego, I’m incredibly attached to myself, fascinated by myself, turned on by myself, which feels like something that they’d want to hear but also happens to be true, the bourgeoisie (the California bourgeoisie, which is to say the eschatological bourgeoisie) hates itself and is always running from itself and seeking to fill an inexhaustible void, which calls-into-being the idea of the underclass (racial, gendered, physical, tropical, whatever), a kind of overflowing, hypersexual embodiment, and the funny thing is this is a projection of their own insecurities and terrors, but it also happens to be true, because disembodiment was a historical aberration, neurosis, too, and the bourgeoisie could never exist without its own sadistic self-discipline, a discipline and a false consciousness that really never takes hold anywhere else, since it’s ridiculous, it doesn’t make sense, it’s boring, and it’s useless. He unfolds a massage table and asks if they can massage me, so I lie down and let their hands explore my body for a while. She goes to another room and comes back wearing this lavender slip and at this point all I want to do is fuck her, she’s the most intoxicating woman I’ve ever seen, ever touched, ever smelled, though this in part is from the aura of the drugs she’s on. Let’s move to the bedroom, he says. So we go in there and she gets down on the floor and starts sucking both of our dicks. I realize I should probably pay some attention to him, and plus the idea of sucking a dick with another woman has always been a fantasy of mine, so I get down on my knees and start sucking his dick (which is pretty big), too, and then I realize that this could be my last evening on Earth and all of this could be a dream, and so I say fuck it, I’m just gonna pay attention to this Goddess in front of me, so I start kissing her lips, her neck, her tits, while she moans in ecstasy. Then we get on the bed and he confesses (it’s always in the genre of confession) that he’s had this fantasy for a long time, he’s pretty Dom but he really wants to suck a dick, and I say I understand, I understand baby, so he lies down and she straddles him and fucks him while I fuck his mouth for awhile, slapping my dick against his face, you like that?, yeah you do, etc. Then he starts fucking her and I go down on her while he’s fucking her (another fantasy of mine), and she squirts more than I’ve ever seen a girl squirt in my life. Then he seems to get tired so I just go down on her for a while, and she squirts again. Sorry, she says. No, I say, it’s beautiful. At some point they slip off into that dreamy, drugged, liminal consciousness, and the fucking comes to an end, or tapers off, and I lie next to her just kissing her, staring into her eyes. Leila, she says, we’ve been dreaming about you for so long. It turns me on to be someone’s fantasy, I say. I’m my own fantasy, I say. What were you put on this Earth to do, Leila?, she says. I think about it for a while. I’m an artist, I say. I’ve been blessed, but also my life has been full of a lot of pain, it’s been harder than most, and yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything, I wouldn’t trade the vision I’ve been given access to, the beauty and the nightmare, for anything, nor my capacity to bring it down to the material realm, to express it in art. But, you know, I say, I’m not monastic, the world of Spirit itself doesn’t interest me, what drives me is interpersonal, is erotic, is the contingent and surreal ways in which we come together to share the darkness and the weirdness we all hold within us. And also, I’m a romantic, it’s always getting me into trouble, I’m always falling in love with other women, though I never know if it’s because I want her or want to be her. Leila, you’re a real lesbian, she says, and laughs. When did you know you were a woman?, he asks. They always want to know that. I always knew, I said. At this point it’s like saying a line in a script. He starts comparing transition to a young woman he knows who killed someone in a drunk driving accident, and even though it’s a macabre and possibly offensive and ostensibly nonsensical analogy, I understand it immediately. Some of us, I say, by accident or because of our nature, go to the very extremes of being, whether through crime or through some other sacred transgression, in which the absolute darkness and absolute freedom of our existence is revealed, in which we have no choice but to transform into something radically different from who we thought ourselves to be. He asks about my ancestry, and I say I’m Ashkenazi Jewish on my dad’s side, Slavic on my mom’s. Ashkenazis are the smartest race, aren’t they?, he asks. Me, he says, I did one of those DNA tests and I was hoping I’d be something other than white, other than Northwestern European, but nope, turns out my ancestors were pretty boring, they didn’t really like to fuck outside of the gene pool. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in being white, she says, turning to him. You know, white people have so much to teach us, and we should be grateful to learn from them. I think it’s funny that she thinks she’s not white, since her dad’s Norwegian. He asks if there’s racism in Brazil, and she says no, there’s not, there it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or whatever, because we are all the same, though now that the new government is in power, the left, you have things changing slowly, you have people trying to pretend they’re oppressed for being black and whatnot. You see, you guys here, you’re lucky to have human rights and all that, and we don’t really have that, so we can learn human rights from you, but we shouldn’t go too far. He leaves to go to the bathroom and the two of us are left in bed together. I just decide to ignore everything she just said and kiss her some more. I realize it’s time to go. I get dressed and say goodbye to her. She’s drifting off to sleep. Goodnight, Leila, she says, you’re a beautiful woman…He calls me an Uber and I go home.
..A few days later I tell Heidi about the experience. It was incredibly erotic, and absurd, and in a weird way healing for me. I’d started to think I wasn’t capable of feeling sexual attraction anymore, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as attracted to someone as I was to that woman, nor felt as sexually adored by anyone, either. But besides that, you know, they were typical California rich people: into race science, Zen Buddhism, and psychedelics. They took all the good things in this world, Heidi said, and made them fascist, and what did they leave us with? What?, I said. They left us with heroin and dark magic…