In One Person

constantly remind me. “I also like other transsexuals—not just the ones like me, you know.”
    “I know, Donna,” I would assure her.
    “And I can deal with straight guys who also like women—after all, I’m trying to live my life, all the time, as a woman. I’m just a woman with a penis!” she would say, her voice rising.
    “I know, I know,” I would tell her.
    “But you also like other guys—
just
guys—
and
you like women, Billy.”
    “Yes, I do—
some
women,” I would admit to her. “And cute guys—not
all
cute guys,” I would remind her.
    “Yeah, well—fuck what
all
means, Billy,” Donna would say. “What gets to me is that I don’t know what you like about me, and what it is about me that you
don’t
like.”
    “There’s nothing about you I
don’t
like, Donna. I like
all
of you,” I promised her.
    “Yeah, well—if you’re going to leave me for a woman, like a straight guy one day would, I get it. Or if you’re going to go back to guys, like a gay guy one day would—well, I get that, too,” Donna said. “But the thing about you, Billy—and I don’t get this
at all
—is that I don’t know who or what you’re going to leave me for.”
    “I don’t know, either,” I would tell her, truthfully.
    “Yeah, well—that’s why I’m leaving you, Billy,” Donna said.
    “I’m going to miss you like crazy,” I told her. (This was also true.)
    “I’m already getting over you, Billy,” was all she said. But until that night in Hamburg, I believed that Donna and I had a chance together.
    I USED TO BELIEVE my mom and I had a chance together, too. I mean more than the “chance” of staying friends; I mean that I used to think nothing could ever drive us apart. My mother once worried about my most minor injuries—she imagined my life was in danger at the first cough or sneeze. There was something childlike about her fears for me; my nightmares gave her nightmares, my mom once said.
    My mother told me that, as a child, I had “fever dreams”; if so, they persisted into my teenage years. Whatever they were, they seemed more real than dreams. If there was any reality to the most recurrent of these dreams, it eluded me for the longest time. But one night, when I’d been sick—I was actually recuperating from scarlet fever—it seemed that Richard Abbott was telling me a war story, yet Richard’s only war story was the lawn-mower accident that had disqualified him from military service. This wasn’t Richard Abbott’s story; it was my
father’s
war story, or one of them, and Richard couldn’t possibly have told it to me.
    The story (or the dream) began in Hampton, Virginia—Hampton Roads, Port of Embarkation, was where my code-boy father boarded a transport ship for Italy. The transports were Liberty ships. The ground cadre of the 760th Bomb Squadron left Virginia on a dark and threatening January day; within the sheltered harbor, the soldiers had their first meal at sea—pork chops, I was told (or dreamed). When my dad’s convoy hit the open seas, the Liberty ships encountered an Atlantic winter storm. The enlisted personnel occupied the fore and aft holds; each man had his helmet hung by his bunk—the helmets would soon become vomit basins for seasick soldiers. But the sergeant didn’t get seasick. My mom had told me that he’d grown up on Cape Cod; as a boy, he’d been a sailor—he was immune to seasickness.
    Consequently, my code-boy dad did his duty—he emptied the seasick soldiers’ helmets. Amidships, at deck level—a laborious climb from the bunks, below the deck—was a huge head. (Even in the dream, I had to interrupt the story and ask what a “head” was; the person I thought was Richard, but it couldn’t have been Richard, told me that the head was a huge latrine—the toilets stretched across the entire ship.)
    During one of many helmet-emptying ordeals, my father stopped to sit down on one of the toilets. There was no point in trying to pee while standing up; the ship was pitching and rolling—you had to sit down. My dad sat on the toilet with both his hands gripping the seat. Seawater sloshed around his ankles, soaking his shoes and pants. At the farthest end of the long row of toilets, another soldier sat holding the seat, but this soldier’s grip was precarious. My dad saw that the other soldier was also immune to seasickness; he was actually reading, holding on to the toilet seat with only one hand. When the ship suddenly pitched more