Lavery Please Miss

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-914198-05-2
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you've ever read before. Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and a 100 per cent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. How could her story be straightforward when she is anything but? The telling of her tale is kaleidoscopic, wild and audacious: Grace performs in a David Lynch remake of Sunset Boulevard and is reprogrammed as a 1960s femmebot; she is targeted with anonymous letters from a mysterious cabal of clowns; she writes a socialist manifesto disguised as a porn parody of QI (or is it vice versa?). As Grace fumbles toward a new trans identity, she tries on dozens of different voices, creating a coat of many colours. The result is dazzling, unique and unforgettable. Startlingly funny and ruthlessly smart, Please Miss gives us what we came for, then slaps us in the face and orders us to come again.

Grace Lavery teaches at UC Berkeley, where she specialises in Victorian literature, trans feminism, and cultural studies. She has written for LARB, Autostraddle, Foreign Policy, the New Inquiry, Them, the Guardian and Slate, among other publications. She lives in New York.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lavery, Grace

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

JUGGALO CHICKEN DRINK

My friends, I have solved my penis problem!

Or rather, my friend D solved it for me. We were walking together around the marina next to my apartment in Berkeley, and we were talking about our genitals. Most of the time, my penis does very little but flop around enthusiastically, like a miniature windsock man at a showroom for toy cars. Once in a while, it takes a stab at stiffening, gets halfway through, and then gives up. On such occasions it feels like a coil of fetal spine. There is something disgraceful about the experience, not merely because that very image—as though I were laying my own miscarried fetus across my hand—is utterly obscene. But more, because this atrophied and broken fragment still contains something that I want, something that I want more of.

“A desire (e.g., for a dick) drowned in a bigger desire for its absence?” I asked.

“Yes, I suppose,” D responded.

We tumbled into a parking lot, near to an abandoned Japanese steakhouse. D has no dick;—or rather, they have an array of them, various sizes and shapes. A wind blows across the parking lot. It is difficult to historicize. Perhaps this Japanese restaurant opened in the early 2000s, when West Berkeley was being redeveloped, and perhaps they imagined they could tempt the gentrifiers half a mile further outland for teppanyaki and a view of Sausalito? And perhaps people did not want to make the journey, but rather wanted to stay on Fourth Street, which was pretty in an entirely Northern Californian way—a few trees, and a lot of very expensive-looking boutiques selling artisanal wool products, travel books, and insipid-tasting tamales.

Or perhaps they were chased out by these turkeys. A squad of turkeys, in a tree in the parking lot. Four girl turkeys clustered around one entirely malevolent boy turkey, a pantomime turkey version of Gary Oldman’s Dracula. A turkey resplendent in black plumage, fringed in electric blue.

As D and I passed the turkeys, I was describing my guilt at another one of these baby-spine hard-ons that had occurred that morning when, after having woken up early, I was entertaining myself by reading Riverdale recaps on my phone. One of the recaps recorded that Mädchen Amick’s character had said something sarcastic like “shove it up your ass,” or “my ass,” or something with “ass” in it, and all of a sudden I’m shuffling into the bathroom, holding the unchristian waste of my masculinity in my hand. It’s all very dramatic.

But where did the guilt come from? My shriveled little fellow looked, from one angle, like a phallus, or at least an instance of phallic sexual desire, which a lot of us girls (assuredly including me) are keen to do away with for any number of reasons. If it was accompanied by pleasure, as it was for me, it might then also intensify the fear that, after all, what they say about us is true, that we are self-deluded boys attempting to get close to women for nefarious sexual purposes. It is difficult for trans women who love women to treat our own phallic sexuality as anything other than a disgraceful giveaway.

I’m saying something obvious, I’m embarrassing myself. Let me tell you about D. They are very short and very hot. Like a short, hot dyke. Got it? They look implausibly like Selena Gomez. They have Crohn’s. Like me, D is an alcoholic and drug addict, and we both like the same kinds of drugs: the ones that make one feel very aware one is having an intense experience. Neither of us has used drugs or alcohol in a few years, and we have different strategies for handling the fact. Mine have included prayer, and a high daily dose of synthetic estradiol; theirs have included bass fishing, and submerging every morsel of food in front of them in a lagoon of English mustard.

They have queries about their dicks, too. D likes to fuck—indeed, D has developed a sort of theology of fucking, a sense that fucking will either save the world or, at least, create a new world so beautiful that we won’t mind letting the old one die. They can be both selective and cruel: they reserve lifeboats for those they happen to find hot, and screw the rest. I suppose one redeeming feature is that they find many people hot, and that there’s plenty of overlap with some of my own types—yoga bitches, closeted milfs, masc bottoms.

D’s pattern of speech is quick, remorseless, absolute. We met at a “community event” a few years ago, and I went up to them afterwards and made a joke about my sex change, which they (kindly) understood as deliberately gauche. Another, more visibly cheerful lesbian joined me and made a couple of more tentative jokes in D’s direction, but D was focused on me—very early transition, short spiky hair, messed-up lipgloss, and a slutty denim skirt. I may as well have been wearing a button that said, “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!”

“I feel guilty because the moment of losing my dick—and I realize chemical castration is a process with more gradations than we usually allow—but anyway there was a moment, a cusp—that cusp moment was important.”

“Spiritual?”

“Yes, and it confirmed something about my sex change. Subtly, through internal means. Like, a surgeon could only be shaping the outside.”

The fundamental problem with the whole notion of using surgical means to effect a sex change is this: the grass is always greener. The desire to turn into a woman proves that you aren’t one; desire and identity are antithetical principles. This, bluntly, is Hannibal Lecter logic. But it’s also kind of true.

D, a non-binary woman, has installed the desire for a dick within their pussy hole. It is a remarkable solution to the problem. They explain:

“I love my dicks. I love to look down and know that it is my dick, and that it is fucking you, and that nobody ever had a bigger one or fucked you better with it.”

I nod.

“But recently I have been using my strapless dick more. It starts inside me, at the root chakra, and pulls itself out of my cunt, out into the world. I feel it pushing inside me and growing out of me. When I fuck you”—and here I should add, D has never fucked me, alas—“you are inside me and outside.”

My eyes dilated. Were the turkeys following me? D continued:

“The dick is mine, and it is in me. I enjoy the sense that the dick is nestled, in the pussy.”

My mind flashes to Adorno, who writes about nestling.1 He doesn’t use the word “dick.” It is the first time something clicks with me; the melancholic attachment to the dick that flares up in the form of guilt, moves through the phantom pussy, and nestles within.

This was the third of three big conversations about my penis problem, and the most recent. From my current perspective, I suppose my penis is hardly a problem for me at all. Years later, I have found myself able to call my penis a “clit,” like we are supposed to, and it doesn’t always feel embarrassing to do so. I’ll probably get bottom surgery one day, years later, but it’s not urgent—I already have an interiority, and I know where it is and what to do with it.

On the way home from the marina, I stop into Hole Foods to pick up a Juggalo Chicken Drink. The year was 2017, and meat-based Juggalo beverages—the beverage wing of the Insane Clown Posse—were everywhere. I’m afraid I got snagged on the marketing jingle that was ubiquitous that year, delivered in that rugged ICP style:

I do the Juggalo chicken juice rap all day, SON

Grab a cup of chicken and I’m on my way, MOM

Juice a tasty chicken I call that “fowl play,” YO

Bottle up the chicken like a poultry FAYGO.

I didn’t even know what “faygo” meant, but it sounded effeminate—in any case, I don’t know much about Juggalo culture. I think I watched Juggalo porn once, but now I recall it, it seems so unlikely: a tiny woman spinning around on her head in front of a very fat man. Not improbable to contemplate in itself, and it feels quite hot, the sense of similarity and difference, like watching Kristin Chenoweth standing next to Allison Janney.

I like soup, in general, and I’m not above a soup-based beverage of almost any kind—I’ve certainly pounded the odd gazpacho like I was beating down a whiskey sour. “Juggalo” was such a good word, like “jugged hare,” a hare braised in its own blood. And then there was the suggestive triptych: chicken, bone, broth.

Chicken.

Bone.

Broth.

Chicken: chick, hen, egg, hatch, girl, not a rooster, not a cock.

Bone: fuck, dick, fuck, dick.

Broth: brother, juice, medium, liquor, substrate, reagent.

A bone in a liquor; an egg fuck in a medium, a chick’s dick bone reagent, not-cock-dick-substrate. I don’t even know whether they still sell the...