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

55 - Cinderella Story

Her name was  Cindy Story and she was the most famous transgender person on this planet. Or, as far as SETI has yet been able to determine, any planet.

From the early nineties up until fairly recently, the world knew her as Sam Story, the front man and songwriter for the rock and roll band named — after, I assume, approximately zero seconds of thought — The Story. (Which obviously made coming up with album titles really easy: Story Time, Another Likely Story, Never Ending Story, etc.).

With his trademark feral growl, cliché but catchy lyrics and a preternatural ability to co-opt just enough of current musical trends to stay evergreen, The Story achieved tremendous success, every few years popping up like mushrooms on the Billboard charts, their international tours selling out stadiums.

Sam had a hyper-masculine persona. It was so extreme that, even before he came out, he felt to me almost like a parody or maybe a piece of feminist performance art, which I guess he kind of was. Sam raced cars, drove motorcycles, flew planes, shot guns, lifted weights, did parkour, bow-hunted, collected knives and swords, and would — as he said in his Rolling Stone interview — "fuck anything that moved."

Quintessential overcompensation.

His personal life, as you probably surmised, was a disaster. Even by rock and roll standards. He had a penchant for drugs, fighting, DUI's. According to TMZ he had killed someone in a car crash, but was never prosecuted. (When you're rich and famous, everyone is your enabler, including the justice system.) He married some of the world's hottest women and divorced them, too. He experienced ferocious mood swings and according to Us Weekly attempted suicide at least twice. Legend had it that when he met Kurt Cobain at the Grammys in 1996, Kurt said, "That dude's got problems!" Which probably isn't true because as a matter of record, Cobain didn't attend the 1996 American Music Awards because he hated award shows and, also, had been dead for two years.

Tammy and I had never been fans of The Story, but we weren't detractors, either. I'd describe our attitude as benign indifference; the same way we thought about the Foo Fighters or U2 or Van Halen. We didn't mind when one of their songs came on the radio, but we never bothered to actually buy their music, either.

A few years earlier, The Story announced that they were going on  hiatus. No explanation was given. (The last song they recorded, by the way — and this is absolutely true — was called I'm Sick Of Being A Man, I Wanna Be A Woman, which amazingly nobody in or out of the band thought anything of at the time. I have to admit, it made me feel a whole lot better about the clues I missed with Tammy. I mean, I was pretty oblivious, but this was basically a signed confession set to music.)

Anyway, most of the band members quietly pursued solo projects or joined other bands or were strapped to a rocket ship and shot into space — who cares? — while Sam mysteriously dropped out of the public eye. Initially, there was a lot of frenzied tabloid speculation about rehab, AIDS, an overdose. Only The Weekly World News got it right, but no one took them seriously because, well, it was The Weekly World News. (It seems that when you do enough articles like "World's Smartest Ape Goes To College" and "Dead Hubby's Ghost Haunts Toilet" you lose some credibility. Although it's still more factual than Breitbart.)

Eventually the rags, and everybody else, lost interest and and moved on. By the time Sam — now in his mid-thirties and called Cindy — was catapulted into the national consciousness again I had pretty much forgotten all about him. Her. The news media started buzzing about a BREAKING STORY (ha!) and then, for the next six months, it was all Cindy Story, all the time.

As always, America was deeply divided. There were those who thought Cindy was courageous, a role model, a symbol of hope to everyone struggling with LGBT issues. Others insisted that she was mentally ill, or a sexual deviant poisoning the minds of our youth. Still others believed that she was nothing more than a privileged white guy in drag, or was just a shameless opportunist, hoping to cash in, and given that her new solo album entitled (of course) Cinderella Story dropped a week after she came out publicly, that wasn't necessarily an irrational guess. And because of her mega-stardom, Cindy quickly emerged as the de facto spokesperson for the transgender issues, whether she liked it or not.