Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

foliated forearms and told him what had caused them.
    “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “It’ll do that.”
    “It’s amazing stuff,” I said. “It really boosted my spirits… and my energy.”
    He nodded. “Same here.”
    “I worry sometimes about prostate cancer, but…” I didn’t pursue this thought since it wasn’t an issue for him, I presumed, and I was wary of destroying our cozy commonality. “Everything’s got its risks, I guess.”
    Another nod. “That’s why I’m against surgery.”
    I thought he meant surgery in general, which puzzled me.
    “You know,” he said. “The operation. The addadictomy.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Is that what it’s called?”
    He grinned. “That’s what I call it, anyway.”
    It took me a few more seconds to get it. “Oh, fuck,” I said, laughing. “Addadictomy.”
    Jake looked pleased with himself. “A little tranny humor,” he said.
    I’d never heard him use that term to describe himself, so I was emboldened to press further. “Have you always felt like a gay man?”
    He thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ve always felt male. And I’ve always wanted to be with men.”
    “Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked.
    Jake lobbed his yogurt can into a trash barrel like a kid shooting hoops. “I don’t feel very gay most of the time.”
    It wasn’t hard to grasp the alienation of a guy who wants to chase dick without having one himself. Jake had spent most of his life feeling betrayed by his anatomy, but even now that he’d relocated to Queersville he was still too queer for the queers. He just needs a nice girl, I thought, reminding myself of my mother when she learned I was gay. But it was true. Men are hung up on visuals, as Shawna had recently observed, but women give weight to the heart and the mind when measuring attraction. If Jake identified as a butch lesbian—or even as a straight man—some woman would find reason to love him.
    “There’s someone I want you to meet,” I told him.

    Three weeks later, when Anna was recuperating from her stroke, that meeting finally occurred. I took Jake by St. Sebastian’s Hospital one day after work and introduced him to my former landlady. She was thrilled to have company beyond her regulars, and I could tell that she saw in Jake a potential protégé. Jake, in turn, found a sort of spiritual grandmother, someone who understood him without effort or condescension. He would visit on his own after that, bringing her chocolate and magazines, then just sitting by her bed while she read. “He doesn’t have much to say,” Anna once told me, “but there’s a lovely little light in there.”
    At that point Anna was just another tenant at 28 Barbary Lane, having sold the building in the early nineties to a Hong Kong investor. When her stroke made it clear that she could no longer manage that precipitous climb, it was Jake who proposed a solution. There was a vacancy in his building, he told her, a sunny garden apartment surrounded by level terrain. His own place was upstairs, so he could lend her a hand whenever she needed it. Anna accepted this invitation but only if Jake would agree to be paid for his services. She had a decent nest egg from the sale of the building, and she needed assistance from someone, so why shouldn’t it be Jake? She knew he needed the money, and he already felt like family.
    She got a good deal more family than she bargained for. Jake’s flatmates, an investment counselor and a teacher at the Harvey Milk School, were also transgendered folk—MTFs like Anna—and they regarded their new downstairs tenant with something akin to reverence. Anna, after all, had affirmed her womanhood well before either one of them was born, so it was almost like having an ancestor around—or so they once told me.
    I was invited to a cocktail party in the upstairs flat shortly after Anna took up residence. There were several dozen trannies in the room, hovering around her like acolytes. I couldn’t help remembering that Anna had struck me as the rarest of birds all those years ago, yet here she was now, just one among the many. She had never aspired to being ordinary, of course, but it must have been awfully nice to have a little company.

7
    Footnotes to a Feeling
    E very six weeks or so Ben takes off for an afternoon of hunting and gathering at one of the local bathhouses. He invariably tells me this a day or so before, since he wants me to know he’s not sneaking around, and I do my best