Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

muscle mass. Wouldn’t that suck big-time? It didn’t seem likely, but he could ask about it on Wednesday at the Lou Sullivan Society. There might be other guys there with similar experiences.
    If you can manage to keep from blushing , dude.
    T HE CLIENT WENT BACK INTO the house. Jake finished his jackhammering and lost himself in the arrangement of rocks on the slope. He had picked out these rocks himself at the stone yard in Berkeley. They were rough and honey-colored, streaked with purple and rust, and he enjoyed finding their kinship to each other as he embedded them in the soil. They were like pieces of a puzzle that he was building and solving at the same time. When all the rock was in place, he would have the entirely different satisfaction of tucking moss and soft grasses between the cracks. That was the icing on the cake.
    It didn’t matter that he was doing this for a douche nozzle. This rock garden was Jake’s when all was said and done. He would photograph it, remember it, imagine it years from now as a mossy ruin from an earlier time— his ruin—since the guy who builds something owns it forever. Even after Karl Rove had died or moved away, this mighty tumble of golden stone would still be Jake’s, solid proof of his days on earth.
    He had said something like that the week before at Lou Sullivan. Not before the group or anything—he was way too shy for that—just gabbing afterward with a hot trans dude named Rocco, who had already announced his taste for men. Jake had hoped to impress him with his devotion to his work, but ended up sounding like a total garden geek. It didn’t help that a butch bio guy was lurking nearby pretending to swig on a Snapple but obviously ready to pounce on Rocco as soon as Jake was done boring him to death with horticulture. He left just after that, choosing solitude over disgrace.
    He was no good at meeting people. Even at a support group for trans folk he felt like a visiting Martian. He had thought that would change once he’d made the leap, but so far, claiming another gender—even the one that came naturally to him—had merely offered new ways to feel alienated, new opportunities for humiliation. His hookups with bio guys had been one-night stands at best; the only good that had ever come from that had been meeting Michael and thereby landing this job. A lot of bio guys were just in it for the novelty, losing interest altogether once their curiosity was satisfied. As for other trans guys, they were either cruising the Lone Star for liquored-up bio bears or flirting with the femme dykes down at the Lexington Club. They weren’t looking for Jake.
    Still, his drive for completion never waned. In fact, once he’d begun the testosterone, the urgency for the surgery had grown even greater. So he was saving his money, biding his time until the day of deliverance. He was barely past thirty, anyway; the man of his dreams could wait until the plumbing was adjusted. For the moment, at least, he was the man of his dreams, and everything else was needless distraction.
    Besides, there were matters far more pressing than finding a partner. Like, for instance, how to pee believably. That was less of an issue in San Francisco, where people were used to surprises, but he dreaded the thought of being clocked at a urinal in, say, Bakersfield or San Leandro. Michael, after all, often sent him off on shopping forays to nurseries in the suburban boonies. So Jake had sent away for something called a Freshette—a funnel-and-tube urination device used by bio women on camping trips.
    He had worn this thing in his boxer briefs for several days before realizing—on a bus full of school kids, no less—that the funnel looked like some sort of weird domed erection. So he’d trimmed the Freshette down to a less disturbing size before threading its tube through the shaft of a small cushiony dildo he’d found at Good Vibrations. They called it a “packer,” he learned that very day, and it was just what he needed: something believable to pull out of his fly when privacy was impossible.
    He was getting there.
    F OR THREE YEARS J AKE HAD been living in the Duboce Triangle with someone he thought of as his “tranmother.” Anna Madrigal was in her late eighties but still getting about. She’d had a stroke a few years back, remaining in a coma for several days, but she’d recovered and since that time had seemed as blissfully fearless as the sole survivor of an air disaster. Her