“I didn’t know that,” I said. I was feeling less scared now than before. The trucker was apparently taking me at face value.
“But some of these Indians I pick up, they say their people didn’t come over the land bridge. They say they come from a lost island, like Atlantis.”
“Join the club.”
“You know what else they say?”
“What?”
“They say it was Indians wrote the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution!”
As it turned out, he did most of the talking. I said very little. But my presence was enough to keep him awake. Talking about Indians reminded him about meteors; there was a meteor in Montana that the Indians considered sacred, and soon he was telling me about the celestial sights a trucker’s life acquainted a person with, the shooting stars and comets and green rays. “You ever seen a green ray?” he asked me.
“No.”
“They say you can’t take a picture of a green ray, but I got one. I always keep a camera in the cab in case I come across some mind-blowing shit like that. And one time I saw this green ray and I grabbed my camera and I got it. I’ve got the picture at home.”
“What is a green ray?”
“It’s the color the sun makes when it rises and sets. For two seconds. You can see it best in the mountains.”
He took me as far as Ohio and let me off in front of a motel. I thanked him for the ride and carried my suitcase up to the office. Here the suit also came in useful. Plus the expensive luggage. I didn’t look like a runaway. The motel clerk may have had doubts about my age, but I laid money on the counter right away, and the key was forthcoming.
After Ohio came Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. I rode in station wagons, sport cars, rented vans. Single women never picked me up, only men, or men with women. A pair of Dutch tourists stopped for me, complaining about the frigidity of American beer, and sometimes I got rides from couples who were fighting and tired of each other. In every case, people took me for the teenage boy I was every minute more conclusively becoming. Sophie Sassoon wasn’t around to wax my mustache, so it began to fill in, a smudge above my upper lip. My voice continued to deepen. Every jolt in the road dropped my Adam’s apple another notch in my neck.
If people asked, I told them I was on my way to California for my freshman year at college. I didn’t know much about the world, but I knew something about colleges, or at least about homework, and so claimed that I was going to Stanford to live in a dorm. To be honest, my drivers weren’t too suspicious. They didn’t care one way or another. They had their own agendas. They were bored, or lonely, and wanted someone to talk to.
Like a convert to a new religion, I overdid it at first. Somewhere near Gary, Indiana, I adopted a swagger. I rarely smiled. My expression throughout Illinois was the Clint Eastwood squint. It was all a bluff, but so was it on most men. We were all walking around squinting at each other. My swagger wasn’t that different from what lots of adolescent boys put on, trying to be manly. For that reason it was convincing. Its very falseness made it credible. Now and then I fell out of character. Feeling something stuck to the bottom of my shoe, I kicked up my heel and looked back over my shoulder to see what it was, rather than crossing my leg in front of me and twisting up my shoe. I picked correct change from my open palm instead of my trouser pocket. Such slips made me panic, but needlessly. No one noticed. I was aided by that: as a rule people don’t notice much.
It would be a lie to tell you I understood everything I was feeling. You don’t, at fourteen. An instinct for self-preservation told me to run, and I was running. Dread pursued me. I missed my parents. I felt guilty for making them worry. Dr. Luce’s report haunted me. At night, in various motels, I cried myself to sleep. Running away didn’t make me feel any less of a monster. I saw ahead of me only humiliation and rejection, and I wept for my life.
But in the mornings I woke up feeling better. I left my motel room and went out to stand in the air of the world. I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long. Somehow I was able to forget about myself for long stretches. I ate doughnuts for breakfast. I kept drinking very sweet, milky coffee. To lift my mood, I did things my parents wouldn’t have let me do, ordering two and sometimes three desserts and never eating salads. I was free now to let my teeth rot or to put my feet up on the backs of seats. Sometimes while I was hitching I saw other runaways. Under overpasses or in runoff drains they congregated, smoking cigarettes, the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled up. They were tougher than I was, scroungier. I steered clear of their packs. They were from broken homes, had been physically abused and now abused others. I wasn’t anything like them. I had brought my family’s upward mobility out onto the road. I joined no packs but went my way alone.
And now, amid the prairie, appears the recreation vehicle belonging to Myron and Sylvia Bresnick, of Pelham, New York. Like a modern-day covered wagon, it rolls out of the waving grasslands and stops. A door opens, like the door of a house, and standing inside is a perky woman in her late sixties.
“I think we’ve got room for you,” she says.
A moment before, I had been on Route 80 in western Iowa. But now as I carry my suitcase onto this ship of the prairie, I am suddenly in the Bresnicks’ living room. Framed photographs of their children hang on the walls, along with Chagall prints. The history of Winston Churchill that Myron is working his way through at night at the hookups sits on the coffee table.
Myron is a retired parts salesman, Sylvia a former social worker. In profile she resembles a cute Punchinello, her cheeks expressive, painted, and the nose carved for comic effect. Myron works his lips around his cigar, foul and intimate with his own juices.
While Myron drives, Sylvia gives me a tour of the beds, the shower, the living area. What school do I go to? What do I want to be? She peppers me with questions.
Myron turns from the wheel and booms, “Stanford! Good school!”
And it is right then that it happens. At some moment on Route 80 something clicks in my head and suddenly I feel I am getting the hang of it. Myron and Sylvia are treating me like a son. Under this collective delusion I become that, for a little while at least. I become male-identified.
But something daughterly must cling to me, too. For soon Sylvia has taken me aside to complain about her husband. “I know it’s tacky. This whole RV thing. You should see the people we meet in these camps. They call it the ‘RV lifestyle.’ Oh, they’re nice enough—but bor-ing. I miss going to cultural events. Myron says he spent his life traveling around the country too busy to see it. So he’s doing it over again—slowly. And guess who gets dragged along?”
“My heart?” Myron is calling to her. “Could you bring your husband an iced tea, please? He’s parched.”
They let me off in Nebraska. I counted my money and found I had two hundred and thirty dollars left. I found a cheap room in a kind of boardinghouse and stayed the night. I was still too scared to hitchhike in the dark.
On the road there was time for minor adjustments. Many of the socks I’d brought were the wrong color—pink, white, or covered with whales. Also my underpants weren’t the right kind. At a Woolworth’s in Nebraska City I bought a three-pack of boxer shorts. As a girl, I had worn size large. As a boy, medium. I trolled through the toiletries section, too. Instead of row upon row of beauty products there was only a single rack of hygienic essentials. The explosion in men’s cosmetics hadn’t happened yet. There were no pampering unguents disguised by rugged names. No Heavy-Duty Skin Repair. No Anti-Burn Shave Gel. I selected deodorant, disposable razors, and shaving cream. The colorful cologne bottles attracted me, but my experience with after-shaves was not favorable. Cologne made me think of voice coaches, of maître d’s, of old men and their unwanted embraces. I picked out a man’s wallet, too. At the register, I couldn’t look the cashier in the face, as embarrassed as if I were buying condoms. The cashier wasn’t much older than I was, with blond, feathered hair. Th
at heartland look.
At restaurants I began to use the men’s rooms. This was perhaps the hardest adjustment. I was scandalized by the filth of men’s rooms, the rank smells and pig sounds, the grunting and huffing from the stalls. Urine was forever puddled on the floors. Scraps of soiled toilet paper adhered to the commodes. When you entered a stall, more often than not a plumbing emergency greeted you, a brown tide, a soup of dead frogs. To think that a toilet stall had once been a haven for me! That was all over now. I could see at once that men’s rooms, unlike the ladies’, provided no comfort. Often there wasn’t even a mirror, or any hand soap. And while the closeted, flatulent men showed no shame, at the urinals men acted nervous. They looked straight ahead like horses with blinders.
I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures. Men think their bodies are theirs alone. They tend them in private, even in public.
A word on penises. What was Cal’s official position on penises? Among them, surrounded by them, his feelings were the same as they had been as a girl: by equal measures fascinated and horrified. Penises had never really done that much for me. My girlfriends and I had a comical opinion of them. We hid our guilty interest by giggling or pretending disgust. Like every schoolgirl on a field trip, I’d had my blushing moments among the Roman antiquities. I’d stolen peeks when the teacher’s back was turned. It’s our first art lesson as kids, isn’t it? The nudes are dressed. They’re dressed in high-mindedness. Being six years older, my brother had never shared a bathtub with me. The glimpses of his genitals I’d had over the years were fleeting. I’d studiously looked away. Even Jerome had penetrated me without my seeing what went on. Anything so long concealed couldn’t fail to intrigue me. But the glimpses those men’s rooms afforded were on the whole disappointing. The proud phallus was nowhere in evidence, only the feed bag, the dry tuber, the snail that had lost its shell.
And I was scared to death of being caught looking. Despite my suit, my haircut, and my height, every time I went into a men’s room a shout rang out in my head: “You’re in the men’s!” But the men’s was where I was supposed to be. Nobody said a word. Nobody objected to my presence. And so I searched for a stall that looked halfway clean. I had to sit to urinate. Still do.
At night, on the fungal carpets of motel rooms, I did exercises, push-ups and sit-ups. Wearing nothing but my new boxers, I examined my physique in the mirror. Not long ago I’d fretted over my failure to develop. That worry was gone now. I didn’t have to live up to that standard anymore. The impossible demands had been removed and I felt a vast relief. But there were also moments of dislocation, staring at my changing body. Sometimes it didn’t feel like my own. It was hard, white, bony. Beautiful in its own way, I supposed, but Spartan. Not receptive or pliant at all. Contents under pressure, rather.
It was in those motel rooms that I learned about my new body, its specific instructions and contraindications. The Object and I had worked in the dark. She had never really explored my apparatus much. The Clinic had medicalized my genitals. During my time there they were numb or slightly tender from the constant examinations. My body had shut down in order to get through the ordeal. But traveling woke it up. Alone, with the door locked and the chain on, I experimented with myself. I put pillows between my legs. I lay on top of them. Half paying attention, while I watched Johnny Carson, my hand prospected. The anxiety I’d always felt about how I was made had kept me from exploring the way most kids did. So it was only now, lost to the world and everyone I knew, that I had the courage to try it out. I can’t discount the importance of this. If I had doubts about my decision, if I sometimes thought about turning back, running back to my parents and the Clinic and giving in, what stopped me was this private ecstasy between my legs. I knew it would be taken from me. I don’t want to overestimate the sexual. But it was a powerful force for me, especially at fourteen, with my nerves bright and jangling, ready to launch into a symphony at the slightest provocation. That was how Cal discovered himself, in voluptuous, liquid, sterile culmination, couchant upon two or three deformed pillows, with the shades drawn and the drained swimming pool outside and the cars passing, endlessly, all night.
Outside Nebraska City, a silver Nova hatchback pulled over. I ran up with my suitcase and opened the passenger door. At the wheel was a good-looking man in his early thirties. He wore a tweed coat and yellow V-neck sweater. His plaid shirt was open at the collar, but the wings were crisp with starch. The formality of his clothes contrasted with his relaxed manner. “Hello deh,” he said, doing a Brooklyn accent.
“Thanks for stopping.”
He lit a cigarette and introduced himself, extending his hand. “Ben Scheer.”
“My name’s Cal.”
He didn’t ask the usual questions about my origin and destination. Instead, as we drove off, he asked, “Where did you get that suit?”
“Salvation Army.”
“Real nice.”
“Really?” I said. And then reconsidered. “You’re teasing.”
“No, I’m not,” said Scheer. “I like a suit somebody died in. It’s very existential.”
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“Existential?”
He gave me a direct look. “An existentialist is someone who lives for the moment.”
No one had ever talked to me like this before. I liked it. As we drove on through the yellow country, Scheer told me other interesting things. I learned about Ionesco and the Theater of the Absurd. Also about Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground. It’s hard to express the excitement such phrases instilled in a kid like me from the cultural sticks. The Charm Bracelets wanted to pretend they were from the East, and I guess I had picked up that urge, too.
“Did you ever live in New York?” I asked.
“Used to.”
“I was just there. I want to live there someday.”
“I lived there ten years.”
“Why did you leave?”
Again the direct look. “I woke up one morning and realized, if I didn’t, I’d be dead in a year.”
This, too, seemed marvelous.
Scheer’s face was handsome, pale, with an Asiatic cast to his gray eyes. His light brown frizzy hair was scrupulously brushed, and parted by fiat. After a while I noticed other niceties of his dress, the monogrammed cuff links, the Italian loafers. I liked him immediately. Scheer was the kind of man I thought I would like to be myself.
Suddenly, from the rear of the car there erupted a magnificent, weary, soul-emptying sigh.
“How ya doin’, Franklin?” Scheer called.
On hearing his name, Franklin lifted his troubled, regal head from the recesses of the hatchback, and I saw the black-and-white markings of an English setter. Ancient, rheumy-eyed, he gave me the once-over and dropped back out of sight.
Scheer was meanwhile pulling off the highway. He had a breezy highway driving style, but when making any kind of maneuver he snapped into military action, pummeling the wheel with strong hands. He pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store. “Back in a minute.”
Holding a cigarette at his hip like a riding crop, he walked with clipped steps into the store. While he was gone I looked around the car. It was immaculately clean, the floor mats freshly vacuumed. The glove box contained orderly maps and tapes of Mabel Mercer. Scheer reappeared with two full shopping bags.
“I think road drinks are in order,” he said.
He had a twelve-pack carton of beer, two bottles of Blue Nun, and a bottle of Lancers rosé, in a faux clay bottle. He set all of these on the backseat.
This was part of being sophisticated, too. You drank cheap Liebfraumilch in plastic cups, calling it cocktails, and carved off hunks of Cheddar cheese with a Swiss Army knife. Scheer had assembled a nice hors d’oeuvre platter from meager sources. There were also olives. We headed back out acro
ss the no-man’s-land, while Scheer directed me to open the wine and serve him snacks. I was now his page. He had me put in the Mabel Mercer tape and then enlightened me about her meticulous phrasing.
Suddenly he raised his voice. “Cops. Keep your glass down.”
I quickly lowered my Blue Nun and we drove on, acting cool as the state trooper passed on our left.
By now Scheer was doing the cop’s voice. “I know city slickers when I see ’em and them thar’s two of the slickest of ’em all. I’d wager they’re up to no good.”
To all this I responded with laughter, happy to be in league against the world of hypocrites and rulemongers.
When it began to grow dark, Scheer chose a steak house. I was worried it might be too expensive, but he told me, “Dinner’s on me tonight.”
Inside, it was busy, a popular place, the only table open a small one near the bar.
To the waitress Scheer said, “I’ll have a vodka martini, very dry, two olives, and my son here will have a beer.”
The waitress looked at me.
“He got any ID?”
“Not on me,” I said.
“Can’t serve you, then.”
“I was there at his birth. I can vouch for him,” said Scheer.
“Sorry, no ID, no alcohol.”
“Okay, then,” said Scheer. “Changed my mind. I’ll have a vodka martini, very dry, two olives, and a beer chaser.”
Through her tight lips the waitress said, “You gonna let your friend drink that beer I can’t serve it to you.”
“They’re both for me,” Scheer assured her. He deepened his voice a little, opened the tone a little, injecting it with an Eastern or Ivy League authority whose influence did not entirely dissipate even all the way out here in the steak house on the plains. The waitress, resentful, complied.