Pageboy, page 11
Carrie and I became good pals and still are. Our shame at the time bonded us, a recognized pain and internal strife. Our mutual self-loathing bringing us close.
“Every self-respecting person hates themselves,” Carrie said once, making me laugh.
Terrified to be out, resentful of the entitled desire to pry open who we were, pushing not only before we were ready, but before we even knew what to say. There’s a shared joy in knowing that the love did come. A bond shifting from shame to healing.
I didn’t take my eyes off Carrie until I had to. Empty wineglasses sat on the table, I watched her mouth as she took her final sip.
That night, Ian and I slept soundly. Sleeping in the same bed came without issue or awkwardness. The next day, we drove to a small community of people who had been formerly unhoused. Between donations from hardware stores and volunteer engagement, the space appeared to be thriving, with permaculture as one of the main focuses. Wood and supplies would be dropped off and used to build tiny homes. Food grew throughout, water catchment tanks stood tall, compost had its place. We were fortunate to be welcomed in, to have them share the evolution of the community with us, how the principles of permaculture were being utilized.
Ian inspired a new sense of poetry in me, instilling a strength to open the heart, grounding me in ways I didn’t know I needed. We discussed art and literature I was not yet familiar with. I wanted to devour information through books, and was always looking for recommendations, from Bill McKibben to David Suzuki to Naomi Klein. In grade twelve I thought I’d go to university and planned on applying to the University of Toronto. I had not been sure what I wanted to study though, my lack of clarity signified I should give it a beat. Cast in X-Men a few weeks later, my first job in well over a year, it ended up being the launchpad into working nonstop. I thoroughly enjoyed learning, well, if it was something I had an interest in, if not, I was stubborn. I wanted my ignorance to be revealed, for new perspectives to take the place of the dominant narratives I’d grown up with, rooted in bigotry and white supremacy. Since I did not attend school after graduating, I devoured books, almost always nonfiction. I didn’t want to stop growing and expanding, and I was terrified I would. I still strive to grow and remind myself to set my self-righteousness aside, there’s always more to learn.
At the end of our trip, we popped into a record store to get a CD for the ride home. They had those listening stations where you could preview new releases. I put on the hip, large headphones to listen to Emilíana Torrini’s “Fireheads” from Me and Armini.
Somebody’s got a long way to go.
You’re not sitting by the phone no more.
You’re gonna throw it away, crash it on a rock.
Yeah, so you can live your life.
Is how it begins.
We got in the white Ford and headed back south toward Eugene. Obsessed with that record, her voice, the sounds, trippy and uplifting, interwoven with depth and emotion, fusing beauty with heart-wrench. It became the score of our future trips together, the beginning of a long story. Our weekend adventure to Portland was an understanding and experimentation in how to follow our joint curiosities, how to be a team and creative partners. I think both of us were yearning for a sense of embodiment that we weren’t sure we’d ever feel. Though stuck in our individual shame storms, when together, so much more felt possible.
“Bleeder” was the song we listened to the most, the last on the album Me and Armini. Her voice washed over us while we curved through the enormous spruce and fir trees, and faded out as we pulled up to Lost Valley, the song coming to an end right before stopping the car. Taking a moment of stillness, reverence, the magic of it all. The intimacy that sharing music brings. I sensed reawakened imagination, a spark. I felt hope.
Meanwhile, communication between Paula and me was falling apart. My fault mostly, I’d stopped calling as much. I blamed it on reception, which was only partially true. Angry, but not sure why, it manifested as passive-aggressive. I felt unburdened by this sense of personal freedom. This was the best that existing had felt in a long, long time. Selfishly, I cared more about my present adventure and new friendship than about taking care of my relationship.
One of my most cherished memories from Lost Valley is a simple one: making sauerkraut. Chopping and chopping a countless number of recently harvested green cabbages with a group of earnest and wholehearted people whose journeys had twisted and turned with pain and joy, trauma and healing, all leading to the now where we found ourselves.
We put the sliced and diced cabbage into large buckets. After adding salt, we began to pound with our fists, over and over and over, pulverizing the diced cabbage, making the liquid separate. Listening to music, connecting, we were making food that would last for months at least. Can it, and it’ll last for years. When the moisture rose, hovering just above the top of the cabbage, I took a plate, placing it on the surface, it fit like a glove. I added a rock on top to weigh it down. Store it away, let it ferment for a couple weeks, and there you go: sauerkraut. What a sublime way to spend time with people. Purposeful and nourishing.
At the end of the permaculture course they had a little graduation party with a talent show. Ian was voted the MC, which fit his gregarious personality perfectly. He decided to host the evening in drag as Courtney Love and encouraged everyone to join in on the drag theme, and most did. We dug through a chest of costumes, overflowing with dresses and long shirts and a cluster of wigs. Ian covered his long red locks with a frazzled blond wig and wore a white slip that stopped above his knees. I loved watching him, it was sexy and embodied. I dressed up as Kurt Cobain, which I did not need to borrow a costume for, I already wore ripped jeans and white T-shirts and large flannels.
He led the show magnificently, never skipping a beat. The charisma, the sass, we laughed and people shared, vulnerable but willing. Beer and tequila and wine made their way about as people sang songs and read poetry. I played a tune I had written on the guitar, simple but sincere. The tenderness that was in that room was nameless, a bonding with strangers that went beyond amicability. It felt magical.
The next morning, plenty of us haggard from the booze, we stood outside in a circle. We held hands while everyone took a turn to reflect on their time there, to say their goodbyes. I felt calm at first, peaceful and grateful, but then an insatiable amount of sadness consumed my body. I began weeping, snot dripping down my face and chin. I kept wiping it away with my windbreaker. My time at Lost Valley, that was the closest I had felt to me in a long time, where I felt present with anything at all. Don’t get me wrong, wherever you are, the mind follows, my brain still taunted me, but fuck, it was a hell of a lot quieter.
Here I found myself again, creeping closer. I felt a new sense of strength, I learned and allowed myself to express my pain a smidgen more. But this was hard to hold on to outside of Lost Valley, no longer in the woods without a mirror, but back in Los Angeles with its relentless traffic and sprawling lawns.
At the party, Ian and I finished with a duet. Sitting in a foldout chair, I picked up the guitar and settled it in my lap. The candlelight lit everyone’s faces, illuminating kind and encouraging eyes. I looked to Ian and he looked back, our nerves peeking through. I smiled and he smiled, too, as if to say, I got you. We played “Doll Parts.” There was video of it at some point, but we have never been able to recover it. How much better, though, it lives in our shared memories, those moments that started it all.
14
U-HAUL
The first time I tried to speak to my mom about sexuality, it didn’t go very well. I was fifteen and coming to terms with how attracted I was to women, only letting myself think of them when I was alone.
Searching online: Am I gay?
How do I know if I am gay?
There was no need to avert my eyes from my male peers. They did not titillate me. My nerves hummed around certain girls, I’d have to avoid them. It must be so obvious, I’d worry.
I was in the passenger seat, head down, mustering up my strength. I turned to my mother. Her eyes were on the road. Her silver earrings dangled, not quite reaching her jawline, swaying with the car’s movement.
“Mom, I think I may be gay—”
“That doesn’t exist!” she yelled before I’d completed the word.
My body sank in the passenger seat, the air sucked from me. I hung my head. She looked forward again and neither of us said another word about it.
As I aged, it became clearer that I wasn’t going to be a pretty straight girl. The pressure from my mother to alter my appearance began to increase, alongside the bullying at school. I tried. My mom’s joy and relief faded to disappointment as I began to return to my original state.
She did not want me hanging out exclusively with boys anymore.
“You like Tina, why don’t you do something with her this weekend?” she’d say offhandedly, as if I didn’t know it wasn’t simply a casual, friendly question.
When high school began, she encouraged me to spend more time with the girls on my soccer team rather than my closest pals. She didn’t want me hanging with the kids who were dressed in all black with various colors of hair, purple, green-blue, poking out from under hoods and beanies. The freaks, the artists … let’s be real, the queers. At one point, suspecting it was a group of pot smokers (it was), she said I couldn’t be around them, despite being aware of the extreme drinking in the jock scene. We didn’t not drink, but nothing like the popular kids. Anytime I hear Joe Budden’s “Pump It Up” I’m transported to 2003, a living room in the South End, drowned in the stench of alcohol and sweat and horniness. Armpit stains taking shape on the American Eagle shirts, girls grinding their asses against the guys, like in the music videos on television. It was unusual when someone didn’t have to get their stomach pumped.
It always felt more about image than anything. Less about me going to hell and more about my mother’s ego. She wanted what the other soccer moms had, a daughter.
I didn’t talk to her about my sexuality again until I fell in love with Paula at twenty years old. Actually, I didn’t talk about my sexuality even then, I just said, “I’m in love with a woman and her name is Paula.”
At twenty-four I tried again. “I’m gay, Mom, you know that, right? I’m gay and I’m not going to end up with a man,” I finally said when a woman moved in with me.
I met my second girlfriend right around my twenty-fourth birthday at a surprise birthday party for Drew. It had been two years since Paula and I, unable to make the distance work anymore, had broken up. We immediately clicked, I didn’t want to leave her side the whole night, unabashedly following her around. She was so fucking funny, deadpan with a perfect dash of cynicism. Whenever she would disappear from view, I’d find myself searching. Enraptured by her eyes when she smiled, a sexy, almost mischievous smirk. The way she moved her body, an effortless cool. She was queer and confident, an actor whose movies I loved. That was the first time I exchanged numbers with someone.
The night ended in the wee hours of the morning as we closed out the bar. But I was too shy to text, to make a plan. I had yet in my adult life to reach out to a woman like that, to initiate. Time passed, but I could not stop thinking of her. Absent-minded, I’d hold Command and N to search her name in a new window, procrastinating from work to scroll and stare. It was close to a month later and I couldn’t muster the courage to simply ask, “Hi, want to grab a bite sometime?” Instead, I used the excuse of a movie premiere to invite her and her best friend, which made it feel less pressured, but just as obvious.
It was the premiere of Super, a film I made right after Inception. Rainn Wilson stars as a DIY superhero, and I played his “kid sidekick,” Libby. When the scene arrived with me in my superhero costume, standing in the doorway trying to get Rainn to fuck me, I cringed. My character stands, stroking her pussy under a little skirt while saying, “It’s all gushy,” before forcing herself on him. Fuck, I thought, regretting both the scene and inviting my crush. Somehow forgetting that this may not be the film you would want a crush to see. Her and her bestie still came to the after-party though. They were sweet and complimentary. I was shaking with nerves, whether they noticed or not, I am not sure.
The day after that we texted, my strategy had worked, albeit rather clumsily. We made a plan for a date but it would not be for a couple weeks, and I was impatient. In another inept move, I convinced Alia Shawkat to have a party for the sole purpose of inviting her. She walked in wearing black jeans, Converse, and a red flannel. The moment I saw her, I lifted, a feeling I hadn’t had since Paula. We all played running charades, laughing our asses off, I wanted to impress her so badly. I couldn’t screw this up. During a pause in the game, I stood with her in a short and small hallway, a perfect little nook. Our backs leaned against the wall, she moved in close, her shoulder touching mine. We both looked to the floor smiling and pressed the sides of our bodies together.
I fell in love fast and hard. We tried to pace out the dates but quickly were spending almost every night together and on our way to cliché. I lived in Beachwood Canyon at the time, she was in the Valley, a bit of a ride on the 101. My place didn’t have much inviting furniture. The living room had a broken futon against the wall with some pillows and two stiff chairs. I literally owned one mug, my fridge was more than likely empty—so we were typically at hers. She had a proper living room with comfortable furniture and a TV in the bedroom. A walk-in closet that was the kind of tidy and organized I could only dream of.
Being with her was the first time I was consistently around a queer group of friends. In high school, there were only whispers of us types, if that, and I was still very, very closeted. Other than the time with Paula at Reflections, and a nerve-racking experience at a bar in Paris with Alia (a story for another book), I had not stepped foot into a gay bar. I was not and had never been a part of a queer community, how to access such a thing was not just a mystery but an impossibility. The loss of which was sizable. Agony in isolation, the shame and pain that I thought was mine alone. My heart aches for my younger self. A tiny bug running to the rim of an upside-down juice glass. What a difference it would have been to sit with queer and trans pals and have them say, I feel that way, too. I felt that way, too. We don’t have to feel that way. You don’t have to feel that way. Not a magic eraser of shame, but it would have undoubtedly quickened things up.
Again, my degree of secrecy suffocated the relationship. It was hard on her, but I was wordless in my excuse other than these five—sorry, I can’t be out.
I dropped her off at a rehearsal one morning. Pulling up in my silver Mini Cooper, she climbed out onto the Hancock Park curb as I turned down PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake.” Her black sunglasses protected her from the already searing sun.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I replied.
A coworker had witnessed me send her off from the Mini, but my face hadn’t been visible. She said it was private after he inquired about the relationship. He joked Minnie Driver was her secret girlfriend, and her coworkers referred to me as that going forward.
She slid her arm around me at a sit-down Bon Iver concert one evening. My body stiff as a board, head still and forward, my eyes danced around, as if they were the ones performing. It felt better to not ask for her arm’s removal in order to forgo a night of intense arguing and dramatic hand gestures. The first time I would let someone hold me at a concert wouldn’t be for more than three years.
I told my mom about her on the phone. She referenced something in regards to me liking men, or an ex, before I said I was dating a woman. Her “I know” came deflated, as if I couldn’t sense her disappointment. In the two years after Paula and I broke up, I had tried to be with dudes. Like in high school, I’d wanted to convince myself it was possible, that I could enjoy it or at least tolerate it. The closet was grueling, it suffocated me. Stewing in my shame, exhausted, lonely, and depressed, I wished to be the person so many wanted me to be. It felt like the only option.
While filming Inception, a friend of Leonardo DiCaprio’s visited set and we had a lovely connection. Peter was warm to everyone, eyes beaming with care. When I saw Leo next, I told him I liked his friend, to which he responded that his friend liked me, too. For our first date we went to Universal Studios with Leo and his mother. Peter and I sat close on the rides, our thighs just touching.
My mom was over the moon. Prayers answered!
But my affair with Peter didn’t last very long, a month, maybe two, like high school all over again.
My girlfriend and I moved in with each other too quickly. Well, sort of. She was selling her first house while I was looking to purchase my first house. The timing was absurd. Escrow closed on her place as I was to move in. So we figured—why not a temporary situation? See how it feels while she figures out her next steps? (Attempting to convince ourselves through subtext.) That’s not the same as U-Hauling.
The congruence of our stuff, physical yes but emotional really, fueled the love, but I was yet to have names or words or tools for mine, and neither did she, at least not the correct ones from my perspective. We clogged the system and burned it to the ground.
I handled the ending horribly, ostensibly forcing her to break up with me. It needed to end, but I was incapable. Shoving my desire to leave, the sick feeling in my throat, to where I don’t even know. Cringing and pulling away in bed, heartbeat rattling, my body was loud and clear. She heard it, too. I could be passionately conveying my love, my desire for a future, but also confused as the words formed on my lips. A disembodied mouth, the little plastic windup one that waddles along with its large feet. The goal was calm, and I did what I could to keep it that way.
And then I got a crush. And then I lied about said crush. And got caught in said lie. Right before the holidays at that. I made everything a complete mess. It turned into an L Word Holiday Special. Cut to me thinking up a stupendous idea to make a mess of the mess. I got back together with her, it stemmed from the guilt I know, whether conscious or not at the time. Easy to see now. That went on for a month. At least that time I did it, instead of manipulating her to do it. She was, rightfully so, pissed.
