Queer, p.54
Queer, page 54
Then one night I let Charles sleep over because he’d said he’d make me coffee in the morning, which was a change of pace. I’m the one who spends all day every day making coffee, and it had made me laugh. I mean, I liked Charles okay, but we were definitely not in love. For one thing, he didn’t really have a sense of humor, but more importantly he kind of dismissed my affection for the oughties—he thought the Animal Collective poster over my bed, my primary instance of décor, was just a picture of some ugly blobs, and he wouldn’t even listen to the playlists I made for him—but I was fucking him because he was hot and didn’t have weird shit around my body, not because we were emotionally compatible. He was an unimposing guy, only a little taller than me, but he was so lean. He had these small, muscular shoulders, and when he fucked me, he would lose himself so completely that I’d lose track of my body, too. He’s the only person I’ve ever had sex like that with.
I mean, when we weren’t fucking, he would talk about computer things, and his new headphones, the album he had apparently been working on for a long time, bands from now, all this stuff I didn’t care about. I tried to be interested but the interest wasn’t there. We would have made a terrible couple.
So anyway I remember very clearly that night he stayed at my house, we slept all tangled up, and then I woke up that morning with the idea firmly in place that I was going to e-mail this girl. I kicked him out without letting him make coffee. I wasn’t mean. He was very sweet, and he even kissed me goodbye. I made myself a coffee, sat at the computer, and wrote a super direct message:
Hey, I actually am kind of interested in Jeffrey Palmer,
what was he like?
She didn’t respond for almost a month. This was back when I was wearing that Strokes shirt every day. That month disappeared into Brooklyn, and then I got a short e-mail from her. She was like:
yeah totes, I dunno, what do you wanna know?
—Bat
She signed the e-mail, “Bat.”
*
This is how I imagine Brooklyn in 2008: there was an American Apparel on every corner. This was before American Apparel became the big store at the end of every mall in America, back when it was still cool—before Dov Charney became governor of California and sold the company to Target.
Everybody was wearing American Apparel, tight skinny jeans and tank tops that were sort of oversized, so they draped across tiny rib cages like ancient Roman tunics almost. Everybody was in their early or mid-twenties. Bedford Avenue was always so crowded with people of all races and both genders that there were people walking in the street, slowing down traffic, even in the middle of the night. It was like a 24-hour 4th of July barbecue. Everyone was holding a can of Pabst with beads of water dripping down the sides and everyone was tall, very thin, and had long hair, even the boys. The girls’ hair was longer though. Some people would be wearing headbands.
Sexually it was a total free-for-all: boys kissing boys, girls kissing boys, girls kissing girls, boys kissing boys and girls at the same time, bodies squirming together along the sidewalk like the sweatiest gay disco in the seventies. Total humidity.
Everyone was a graphic designer and everyone was in a band and every band made dreamy, swoony music with lots of reverb and echo and vague distortion. You’d go see them at the Trash Bar or Southpaw or the McCarren Park Pool or go into Manhattan and see them at CBGB’s.
You’d make out with your boyfriend, who was the singer of the second-to-last band of the night, in the men’s bathroom. They’d just have performed and he’d be sweaty, his hair damp, the hollow under his clavicles, and he’d reach his arm around and pull you close and grab your ass and your breath might catch and you’d feel his cock, hard in his tight jeans, so maybe you’d suck him off, right there, even though there was no lock on the door.
Everybody had those iPods that were like four inches long and two inches deep. Most people had the little white earbuds but some people—your boyfriend—would have big, oversized headphones that kept out the world around them. Sometimes he’d wear oversized, slouchy hoodies.
So on any night of the week, since everybody freelanced, everybody would stay up all night doing coke at somebody’s beautiful converted loft either in Williamsburg or out in Bushwick somewhere, making out or watching Wes Anderson movies or listening to the new Ariel Pink album or talking about Jonathan Safran Foer or Dave Eggers’ new book and smoking cigarettes and talking, sprawled across black leather couches.
The boys all had permanent stubble that was usually just long enough to be soft, but sometimes it was short and rough and it scraped your face when you kissed them.
Everyone was a spaced-out kind of happy, and everyone had enough money, and everyone was pretty, and everyone read books, and all the boys had such thick eyelashes that they looked like they were wearing mascara, and all the girls were the kind of tough that boys can’t even be.
*
After I got Bat’s e-mail, I did some math. Palmer died in 2011, so if she met him, she must’ve been at least fifteen or sixteen in 2010, right? Maybe younger but probably not. So that would make her, like, thirty-five or forty right now. She was probably older. It didn’t matter. I was just already thinking, I am going to meet this woman.
The main reason I was already thinking I wanted to meet her was that she had met Palmer, and I wanted to pump her for everything I could get about him. But another reason is that Jeffrey Palmer lived out his last two decades in Brooklyn. He was one of the original gentrifiers, back in the early nineties, who came to Brooklyn from Manhattan, back when people still wanted to live in Manhattan. I didn’t think somebody who was in her thirties or older would be posting on that message board—and come to think of it, nobody over thirty even should have been posting there, which was my first hint that maybe Bat wasn’t one hundred percent together, although maybe she’d been posting there since she was under thirty and got grandfathered in—which meant that most likely she’d met Palmer in Brooklyn in the early oughties. Which in turn meant that she’d probably lived in Brooklyn back then, and it seems like everybody else who was there then has either gotten old and boring and gotten over all the androgyny and danger, or else they’ve moved away and don’t talk about it.
I wanted to hear firsthand what it was like in halcyon Camelot.
The more I thought about it, the more I threw up. I got all twisted up with nerves over talking about Palmer, and about meeting an internet person in real life, and even about owning up to my obsession with that time period. I shook it off, though, and sent her exactly the message I wanted to send her:
Can I interview you about him? Is it okay if I record it?
If I record it.
*
I should know by now that it’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be to out yourself—as anything—but I was surprised that I felt relief on sending it. It was out of my hands. Letting go of it, pushing back against attachment, erasing—of course it was a relief.
I drink a lot of coffee, but I usually just either drink it at work for free or steal it from work and bring it home. I can’t afford to go out to other coffee shops; it’s why Charles and I didn’t go on dates. I couldn’t afford my half. I mean, I still can’t, I still live in the apartment I was living in then. I’m making a little more an hour at the coffee shop than I was back then, so I’m still just scraping by. But I live in Brooklyn.
You know my life story: when I was little, my parents let me wear girl clothes all I wanted. Even to school. At school, by first grade, I was getting enough shit from other kids that I stopped and convinced myself I was over it. Toward the end of high school I admitted to myself and then to everyone else that I wasn’t over it at all and started wearing girl clothes again. Changed my name. Got on hormones. Moved to New York. It’s the same life story you’ve heard from a million trans women. It’s pretty much everybody’s story, although I guess some of us don’t move here. The only real difference in my story is that for a long time I was super resentful about the years I’d spent trying to be a boy—I was drinking a lot, having bad-news sex with jerks, doing too much coke, whatever, ’til at twenty I found Palmer’s book The Ephemeral Now on the kitchen table of a boy whose name I don’t even remember. I took it, read it, and started letting things go.
So I feel like I owe Palmer pretty much whatever agency I have in my own life. I would’ve stayed in that town, married and childless, ’til I died, if I hadn’t learned to let go of the resentment I had toward a bunch of five-year-olds I’d been in first grade with, the twelve-year-olds (boys and girls, both kinds of lunch tables) who ostracized me so effectively in junior high, and all the boys in high school I had desperate, secret crushes on.
I’m not mad at being broke. I’m not mad at being trans. I’m not mad at pretty much anything, and it’s not because I actively try not to be mad—it’s because I actively try to own, confront, and let go of that anger. It’s not complicated.
So that’s why I decided to spend eight dollars on a coffee at the Verb with this girl I’d met on the internet. Nobody really knows much about Palmer, because his writings were all published posthumously, and I doubted I’d ever have another chance like this.
In retrospect, of course, there are reasons he kept his personal life so personal, and the fact that I wanted so badly to know more about him only shows how far I still had to go in terms of spiritual growth. I’m not mad at my younger self about it, though.
*
I met her at the Verb, that café on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg that’s been around since forever, right next to the Ikea. It feels true that it’s been there for decades: the wood’s all old and dark and chipped, and even though I know that lightbulbs go out instead of just getting dimmer, it feels like the lightbulbs haven’t been changed in forty years. When I walked in, Interpol was playing on the speakers in the corners of the room, and I was like, why do I work at the stupid coffee shop by my house instead of here? It would probably start to feel like hokey nostalgia-town eventually, but still. I bought a coffee, got a table, and started recording sound.
When she walked in the door, I knew this was the woman I was here to see. She looked normal enough, just tired. Her hair was long and dark and cut in these very shaggy layers, limp enough that it might as well not have been a haircut at all, the way it hung. She was wearing an old white tank top, skinny jeans, these cowboy boots that looked ancient, and a short suede jacket; basically, she looked like me on a good day, when I’m really into my outfit, feeling like I’ve got a modern version of a Cat Power thing going on, except instead of 28 and vegan, if I was sixty and didn’t really take care of myself. Which made me feel tired.
“Buy me a coffee, doll?” she asked, walking straight up to my table and sitting down.
“Uh, sure,” I said, immediately off-balance because I’d budgeted for one coffee, and the eight bucks for hers was going to come out of next week’s food money.
Once in a lifetime opportunity, I remember telling myself. Let it go.
So I bought her a coffee, which she immediately started drinking, even though it was way too hot. I was like, are you so skinny because you don’t eat? Do you think coffee is food? But I had that feeling like I was in the presence of such an unknown quantity that I didn’t want to say anything to make her freak out or hate me or leave and not tell me about Palmer, so I just tried to be cool.
*
I know I shouldn’t have recorded it. Or, at worst, I should have listened to the recording once when I got home, meditated on it, and deleted everything. But I didn’t. I still have it.
“So hey,” she said. “You’re like, a JP nut, right?”
“Kinda,” I said. “I guess.”
“That’s cool,” she said. “I remember after he died, when kids were first starting to read him, I was like, that fuckin weirdo? Seriously? but I guess people get something from it or whatever, so I shouldn’t talk shit.”
“Why do you think he was a weirdo?”
“Oh my god, that fucker lived in this VHS tape castle in his own private kingdom of like… Wait okay.”
You can’t hear it on the tape, but I swear to god here she drank the entire cup of coffee. I still couldn’t even sip mine because it was too hot. I remember thinking, this is a weird conversation, and being kind of bummed out that she hadn’t introduced herself, that we hadn’t hit it off—that I already knew on some level that she wasn’t going to tell me anything that would mean anything to me, spiritually.
I already knew that this was a mistake, that I shouldn’t have been recording.
“Okay,” she said. “So around like 2008 I was friends with that guy Pete Malkowitz?”
She paused for me to acknowledge that I knew who Pete Malkowitz was, but I had no idea.
“He was in that band The Fourth Joke?”
Blank look.
“They had a song on one of the Twilight prequels’ soundtracks,” she said, moving on. “That was their big moment. Pete knew everybody at all the clubs and he’d get us into shows for free, so we’d go see bands like every night back when he was still around. Anyway Pete was friends with this girl Melissa and one night he was like, you’ve gotta meet Melissa, so while I was at Pete’s place off Manhattan and like Metropolitan one night, this girl Melissa buzzes up and he lets her in and I’m like, fuck you Pete, you just want me to meet this bitch ’cause she’s trans too? But he’s like whatever man, he’s so fucked up on I don’t even know what that you can’t even be mad at him.
“So this girl comes in, and she’s nice, kinda shy, doesn’t want any coke, doesn’t want any weed, just kinda hangs out and drinks—y’know not a small amount of beer—and then, like, hours later we find out that Pete went up to the roof and fell asleep, but we didn’t know that right then. Suddenly it’s just the two of us in the room.
“I’m like, so how do you know Pete, and I don’t even remember what she said. Who cares? We start talking, and all she wants to talk about is trans stuff, and I was kinda skeezy at the time, I was kinda like whatever, like maybe I’m gonna play it off like maybe I’m not trans, but eventually it gets boring just listening to her stutter and hesitate and not say anything, and all I’ve been able to think of the whole time is like, if you get to pick your own name, why pick something so fucking boring like Melissa? I mean why not pick something cool?”
“Like Bat,” I say. On the recording I sound bewildered; I think by this point I’ve parsed most of it out, but at the time you can hear in my voice how alien the dynamic she’s describing is to me.
“So I ask her and she’s like, I don’t know, somebody told me that you have to pick something incongruous so nobody will think twice about it. I snorted and hit the fucking bong, I was like, whatever. I remember I was healing this—” She showed me a big faded blob of ink on her forearm. “—and I was trying not to scratch it, I was like, whatever, darlin’. Then the night kind of blurs and then I guess that’s how we became friends.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“So yeah anyway turns out my first impression was wrong, she was actually pretty cool, she let me crash on her couch for a couple months after I got fired from Capone’s. She was really funny, too, you just had to drag it out of her. Uh, she died. But maybe like a month after that night at Pete’s—he died too, actually—I was at her place and she was like, I’ve got to go pick up this coat or something I left at my friend’s house, I’ll be back in an hour or two. But I was like, Whatever, I’m not doing anything and I’ve got an unlimited Metrocard I found—I don’t know how long it’s good for, but I might as well take advantage. I’ll come.
“I guess in retrospect she didn’t really want me to come but back in the day I could be kinda pushy and like, god knows how she knew Pete, and I didn’t know any other friends she had, but I figured I was being a good friend if I came along. I was prioritizing that shit, being a good friend. So like, I went with her way the fuck out to like Mapleton, or Dyker Heights or some shit, where you can smell the ocean, and this guy lived in a house. Like a detached house, not an apartment, he had the whole thing.”
183 93rd Street.
“So we go in, and she’s like, I’ll be right out, like she expects me to wait outside, but it was early in the spring and I’m kind of chilly so I’m like nah, I’ll come in, and inside the house, like the whole place—from top to bottom—every wall is like a bookcase full of VHS tapes. It’s seriously like something out of an early scene in a David Cronenberg movie, where it’s not totally freaky yet, just kind of weird you know? Just like setting the mood?”
“Sure,” I said.
“So okay like whatever, the only thing in this house is VHS tapes, there’s no couches or tables or fucking room on the walls to hang anything. I pick one up but Melissa slaps my hand and I’m like, Okay, sorry, and we go up the rickety stairs right inside the front door—they’ve been painted white so many times you can feel your feet sticking to them, like inside an old church or something—up to the second floor where it turns out he’s in this bedroom, on the bed, filming himself, talking into one of those old-timey camcorders.”
He was doing webcam meditations.
“I’m like, This whole house is a dusty pile of old tapes when the whole world runs on Netflix and DVD’s and shit, and you’re filming yourself with a video camera from 1984 the size of a fucking dog? I don’t say anything, though. Melissa’s like Hey, and dude turns the camera to her, keeps filming, he’s like, hey, all pimply face and fat belly and shit.”
Which matches the couple of pictures of him that we’ve got. At this point I’m basically salivating and hanging on every vulgar word she says.
“He’s like, Hey, your jacket’s under the bed, which makes sense that it would have to be hidden because it’s not a fucking VHS tape and obviously all that’s allowed in his house is VHS tapes and VHS recorders and, like, this guy himself. So she gets her jacket out from under the bed. He doesn’t even get out of his bed; he’s wearing this old black t-shirt with a hole at the seam of one sleeve, he looks pretty gross actually. Like his hair’s all greasy and he’s kind of pimply. Melissa’s like, Thanks, she digs her jacket out, and we go downstairs and leave.”
