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

16 - Near Death

Almost nothing brings people as close together as a near-death experience, except maybe freshly-popped popcorn or MDMA. There is something about sharing with someone what you believe to be your final moments — and then getting a seemingly miraculous reprieve — that creates a connection that transcends the normal bounds of human relationships.

This is something that Tom and I experienced. Not just once, but three times. And all of them happened, oddly enough, in a car.

August, 1982

The first time Tom and I almost died in a car was shortly after we saw our first X-rated film. Back then, in-home VHS porn was still in its infancy and if you wanted to see a skin flick you pretty much had to do it in a dark movie theater in a sea heavy-breathing perverts, the way God intended.

This was Zweig's idea. Scott Zweig was two years older than us. His contemporaries considered him an object of derision — thanks to his lazy eye and nonexistent chin — so he chose to hang out with kids our age under the theory that we would think him worldly and wise merely because he was older. And we kind of did.

Zweig was practically vibrating with excitement when he brought up the idea. "It's not just X," he said giddily. "It's triple X!"

"Wow!" Tom said. "That's a lot of X!"

"Three times the X, by my calculations!"

"Do you think," Tom said thoughtfully, "they'll ever come out with quadruple X?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure the human body can withstand that much X."

"Maybe if you started with triple X and then increased the dosage of X slowly over time—"

"OK, shut up, you two." Zweig had limited patience for our banter. "Are you in or not?"

We immediately said yes, because that was the only acceptable answer for heterosexual males, which we both indisputably were. Yes, siree. Nothing to see here. Move along.

What Tom and I weren't, however, was old enough to see an X-rated movie, but Zweig assured us that it wouldn't be a problem._ So of course, the moment she saw us, the ticket seller narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "How old are you?"

Tom froze and I began to stammer an overcomplicated excuse about a lost wallet. But Zweig kept his cool. "We're all eighteen," he said, his tone suggesting that her mistrust was not only unwarranted, but insulting. She decided to take his word for it.

This wasn't a dedicated adult movie theater. Most of the time, it was a family-friendly establishment that showed mainstream films, but I guess they thought this would be a good way to make some extra revenue from the local degenerates. Hopefully, they wiped the seats down before the kids came in to see E.T.

We arrived late and the theater was packed. The only available seats were in the front row. The result was extraordinarily disturbing. Now, I am very much pro-genitalia, but I think most of us can agree that from a purely aesthetic viewpoint they are rather unpleasant. When projected on a forty-foot movie screen ten feet away, they are positively grotesque. Have you ever seen an extreme magnified close-up of human skin? Where what appeared to the naked eye to be smooth and supple now looked like a desert of corrugated meat? It was like that, but worse, because it involved sticky pearlescent liquids shooting in every direction.

Yuck, yuck, yuck.

I vaguely remember the movie. It was about a prostitute who was thrilled to get hired for a respectable job at a legitimate corporation, only to discover, to her horror, that her new position as Client Relations Manager would require the very same positions as her former career. Tom was just as disturbed as I was — although probably for different reasons — and we decided to leave fifteen minutes into the film, so we never got to see the uplifting ending of this story of female empowerment. I assume it had something to do with a protest against the patriarchal power structure in the form of a lesbian sex scene — take that, male oppressors! — but that's just a guess.