Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

2 - Girl-Handled

May, 1980

My friendship with Tom, it can be fairly argued, began as a self-imposed sleep deprivation experiment. For no discernible reason, except maybe to see if we could do it, we stayed awake for a solid forty-five hours. And when it was over, we were best — and extremely tired — friends.

This was during our eighth grade class trip to Washington, D.C., the crowning event at Pine Forest Middle School. For months, our teachers waxed enthusiastic about how much fun the trip would be, to the point where even I, who was skeptical of authority figures in general and the promise of fun in particular, was genuinely excited. But then, when we got to the nation's capitol, they spent all their time berating us for not taking it seriously enough. At every monument and memorial, they bludgeoned us into respectful silence, reminding us of all the brave patriots who had died to make this the best country on God's green earth.

So shut up and appreciate your damned freedom!

After we had appreciated our damned freedom to the faculty's satisfaction, the charter busses dropped us off at our no-frills hotel, where our teachers patrolled the hallways all night, self-importantly talking to each other on walkie-talkies to prevent what Vice Principal Hudac vaguely referred to as "shenanigans."

Which I was pretty sure was code for "smoking pot and fucking."

I was in a room with three other boys. A room, we were horrified to discover, that had only two queen-sized beds. This created quite the conundrum. We needed to figure out a way for four boys to equitably share two large beds. How on earth would we disentangle this Gordian knot?

Now, I'm sure that some smug math major out there is chuckling to himself: It's so simple! Four boys divided by two beds equals two boys per bed. Voila!

Sorry, Professor, your fancy "division" may work in the lab, but those of us who actually lived in the real world of 1980 know something that you apparently don't: sharing a bed with another boy is gay.

(So, for that matter, is saying voila!)

Gay, queer, homo, fag. These were the words that we used as weapons. These were the words we feared. And it didn't really matter if you were gay; even the appearance of gayness — based on the crudest stereotypes — needed to be scrupulously avoided. It was enforced masculinity and it was wearisome for me; I can only imagine how exhausting it must of have been for my classmates who actually were gay, and felt compelled to hide.

I now know that Tom was one of those people. Not gay, exactly, but he knew there was something wrong, something different. He didn't know what he was — he, like the rest of us, didn't even know the word for what he was — but he knew that he couldn't let anyone find out.

All of which is to say, there was no way in hell we'd be sharing beds.

Instead, under the somber gaze of oil-painted Founding Fathers caged in absurdly ornate gold frames, we engaged in a series of contentious coin flips to see who got the beds and who got the floor. The result: I had one bed and Tom had the other. Neither of us, I must say, were very gracious winners. This was another teenage boy trait: rubbing peoples' noses in their misfortune. Because compassion was also gay.

Sleeping on the floor then was a huge, open-mouthed snoring mass named Nico Santangelo and a happy-go-lucky dullard with a crew cut named Ricky Wood. From kindergarten up until he fell asleep that night, Ricky had been my best friend. We played baseball on a cul-de-sac, hockey in the street, basketball in his driveway and Atari in his rec room. We threw snowballs in winter, raked leaves in the autumn, ran through sprinklers in the summer and most assuredly did something equally idyllic in the spring, although I don't remember what. Whittling, maybe. Or flying a kite at our lemonade stand while humming God Bless America. Something like that.