Summer Fun Read online

  I would love to finish this letter to you in a less bummerific fashion, B——, but I’m in such a bad mood right now. I can hear the neighbors yelling at each other through the trailer door, loud enough that I swear their voices are echoing all the way out against the walls of the butte. Human voices are bad enough without echoes, and I’m so, so, so sick of never getting to be alone.

  Love, Gala

  Part One

  September 1, 2009

  Dear B——,

  With this letter, a sorcery has come upon you. Your will is not your own. You will listen to what I have to say to you. You have no choice.

  Here is what is going to happen to you. One day, you are going to grow up. You and your cousin Tom Happy will form a band. Your brothers will join you in this band; a neighbor will too. The band will be successful beyond what you or anyone considered possible. You will work extremely hard, and through that work you will produce albums that people will continue to listen to fifty years after their release.

  (It’s your record, Space-Girls, that I’m playing in my trailer out here. All electric light in here is extinguished: instead, three candles with lush pictures of saints and bilingual prayers slowly melt their way into the metal of my stove, my bare feet scratching against the fiberglass carpet, outside all the desert dark beyond the blue glow of the neighbors’ trailer windows, and it’s your record I put on when I prepare what I’m preparing.)

  Something will happen to you in the course of producing these albums. A crisis will come upon you, a cruel shroud that will settle over your eyes and mouth, that will silence you for years. You are still silent, now, as I write you this letter. But don’t worry, okay? Because soon you won’t have to be.

  Soon, your band, the Get Happies, will reunite for a world tour. Soon you will release the album on which your career foundered back in 1967, forty-two years ago. You will release the album, and it will be perfect; it will be better than the rest of us—listening in with our illegal bootleg MP3s, our encyclopedic knowledge of tape edit tricks of the 1960s—will believe possible. It will initiate a world revolution in music. Your reemergence will initiate another world revolution altogether.

  Believe me, B——, that this is going to happen. I’m going to make it happen.

  You should know, before we get too far together, that I am not actually going to tell you anything about my life story at all. I was born in the early 1980s. I grew up in an affluent Texas suburb. I am a white transgender American woman. This is most of what you need to know.

  The magic ritual I’m performing to ensure that your band will reunite is of course constricted by the cramped space in which I’ve had to install my altar. It’s wedged between the plaid built-in couch against the south wall of the trailer and the fold-down kitchen table and benches on the north such that there’s maybe a foot and a half of clearance on two key sides. The altar itself is a Doc Marten box that I’ve decorated with a black cloth and a diorama of your band made from paint and a bunch of Goodwill-scavenged G.I. Joes, each standing in a magically appropriate position. I did a bunch of drawings of cool magic robes for myself in my sketchbook—tiger print, diaphanous butt-crack lace, gigantic Misfits logo across the front for graphic design reasons—but fabric stores are tricky to come by out here, and let’s just say my sewing skills are very much not the equal of my music appreciation skills, B——. So instead of robes I have a Mascara Masque T-shirt I keep as clean as I can in the stack washer plugged into the mains out back and a skirt with long vines and leaves growing out of the navel of it, a cellulose anchor that roots me to the earth.

  Until I actually did it so that I could write you about it, B——, I was scared for weeks to do this ritual. I felt like my cramped living conditions were maybe too dire for magic, that the way I live is not up to code where the spirit world is concerned. Yet is scary occult ritual only for the rich, the rigorous and prepared? So I did it. I invoked the prayers, drew the pentagrams, connected the circles, adored the archangels: to the east, your baby brother Adam with his bad mustache and bass, its neck doubling as conductor’s baton for the army of backup musicians he has invited to share the stage. To the south, your other brother Eddie, long blond hair hanging about his ears as he sweats and smolders over the crash cymbal. Behind me to the west, Charley B, no relation, guitar strings liquefying along with guitar face as his notes arc and bend and texture, his affable eyes. And to the north, your cousin Tom stiffly gyrating on the microphone in his late-seventies garb of buckskin and feathers while his blue eyes count the asses in seats. All of you are gigantic—the biggest things I can imagine—and you are at the center, B——, choosing the chords on the piano, the pioneer on this magical path, the one in whose footsteps I have to follow if I’m going to get out of this desert place. To summon enough transformative energy to fill the box canyon of fissures and departures my life has become. To become a real person, just like you became, and just like you’ll become again.

  We have to become friends right away.

  We will become friends, too. Once this ritual is complete, on the night your concert tour circles through Albuquerque, as it must, as is necessary to connect with the moping sixty-somethings who now make up your fan base, I will be in the crowd. I will shine up at you, in all of my glamours both psychic and mundane. And you will look down at me from behind your piano. You will know me, B——, because I know you. Because I am devoting a great deal of time and furious ink and missed hangouts with my pal Ronda—who is maybe not a pal, but we are both trans and we both live in the middle of nowhere so we are forced to be pals—in order to know you.

  You will reach over the stage with your long arm—you are as tall as me; older but with a strength I know does not diminish—and you will lift me up to join you. I will have eyes only for you. I will not look at Tom Happy, who stands on the stage with you, capering at the corner of the stage, mic clutched close to his chest like a saint-bone crucifix. You will pass me a guitar, which I am totally learning to play.

  This was my prayer, B——. And I prayed for it a long time, as long as I could, the 99-cent candle burning a ring into my stove surface, until I started to feel stupid and the needle at the end of Space-Girls had run out. So I dispelled the circle, snuffed the candle, sat on the toilet in the plastic bathroom with the damp hanging laundry all around me, icy from the wall AC, brushing my face like submarine leaves. I put on my bike shorts, tank, denim skirt, and sports-strap glasses, took a can of gross raspberry malt liquor from the mini-fridge, and went around back, outside the east wall of the trailer where the bedroom is, where I sat on the stool, plugged my Goodwill guitar into the Thunderbird portable amp I keep out there, and practiced your songs as quietly as I could in ultraviolet twilight—“Suntime Funtine,” “Auction Block Rock,” “God’s a Girl”—until the neighbors in the next trailer shouted, and I stopped. The neighbors are maybe nice people when they don’t remember I’m here; for now I try to stay on their good side, out of sight.

  Sometimes I go out at night to smoke cigarettes behind the trailer. I sit on a small pallet where the owner of the park has stacked crates of old spray paint, rivets and screws from long-ago-lost machine shop hardware, motorcycle tires in different states of sun-bleach and disrepair. I can see the stars over the mountains through my cloud of smoke, and I think about the moon and the constellations and the fact that you’re seeing the same moon. It bothers me that I can know that about you and that you don’t know that about me.

  I dream sometimes, too. Last night, before I started this letter to you, after doing three Tarot readings and throwing up once in preparation for this ritual I’m about to enact, I had an intense dream. You don’t mind me telling you about my dreams, do you? I promise it’ll just be this once.

  I dreamed of a cis woman. One of her eyes was red and one was gray, and her hair was made of purple flames, and she wore silver studs in her face. She was riding a lion, naked but for a pair of Doc Martens, and h
er shoulders were covered in blood, and she was laughing. I was tied to one of the paws of her lion with what looked like coaxial cable, lashed around my ankle. She was calling me to follow her, her and her lion, and we galloped together into a vast city—like the city I came here from—sick with green smoke, silver towers, red dead sky, and Tom Happy’s nasal voice echoing from every open window, singing that steel drum song about islands. And I think the apocalypse cis woman and I had sex or something, B——? I don’t know; sex is something I find hard to imagine, even in dreams? All I know is that I woke up alone, the mechanical sunburst of my alarm clock telling me it was just before dawn—and I spent an hour wondering whether or not I should kill myself—and then I started this letter to you. Because I am proactive in response to despair. Because we all have to be.

  Don’t back down from that wave.

  I’m also sorry this letter is coming in later than I’d planned. You can blame Ronda. I met Ronda soon after moving out here and getting the job at the hostel, which I guess I should describe to you for context. I guess take a deep breath before you read this next part, and maybe get out some notebook paper and pencils or something to make a map for later reference, or just to doodle with until I get through with the boring description stuff and start talking about you again, and about what great close and personal friends we are going to be very soon.

  So the hostel I work at is just south of Elephant Butte, NM (pronounced beaut, like short for beauty; I was thinking it too, though.) The town is called Truth or Consequences, after a game show. As I understand it, one night the citizens of whatever-the-town-was-named-before were squatting in their shacks, heating up canned stews in iron pots, bandannas knotted over their faces against the desert winds—I don’t know what they were doing—when the voice of the show’s host Ralph Edwards came over the wires, all I Am That I Am. A million dollars: that’s what he promised to any town willing to change its name to help promote his show. Most towns passed; the citizens of T or C cashed their check and repainted their post office. Now all they have left is the name, which makes the town sound—agreeably, I think—like the site of a mass cattle rustler hanging. They also have a statue of Ralph Edwards in the park. Every year until his death, Ralph Edwards flew to the town that had given up its name to honor him. He threw them a party and he told jokes. Truth or Consequences was all he had left.

  I work at a hot spring close to Ralph Edwards Park, like a half a mile from my trailer. It’s called the Dream-Catcher Hot Springs Hostel, and it’s right on the Rio Grande: a few dark-stained dormitories with screen doors and coffee cans full of sand and cigarette butts, cabins, a small office, a gravel-and-opuntia yard with picnic tables cracked by long sun. There’s also a dock at the back assembled out of some rusty steel bars and wooden slats. Ropes trail from the support struts near the dock ladder, tracing out ley lines of current in the mountain-cooled river. You’re supposed to climb down the ladder, wrap your legs in the ropes, and let go, spread your arms cruciform in the water while the rope and the river play tug-of-war with you until of course the ropes break and you end up a day later in Juarez. And sometimes you can see the black shadows of gigantic river fish next to the trailing rope, schooling beneath you like asteroids.

  Ronda showed up today at the office while I was playing Doom II: a five-nine transsexual woman with hair knotted in a high ponytail, shoulders broader than mine with a weird sun poncho hanging from her wrists, neon pink lipstick, skirt too tight, platform wedges totally inappropriate for crossing thin sand. I’d played through this map several times before, so it didn’t take too much time, maybe a minute and a half or something, to finish up and save my game before I swiveled my chair to meet her.

  Oh hey, I said. —I’ve been meaning to call you.

  I always want very badly to be believed when I say things like this. I had no idea, from her face, if she believed me or not, but at least she didn’t say anything about it, just took her sandy wedge off of the door frame and planted it, flipping her ponytail at me like a graduation tassel.

  I’ve got today off, she said. —You want to do the baths with me?

  I’m working, I said immediately, and as immediately regretted it. —I mean, I’ve got stuff to do this afternoon.

  Ronda seemed unsurprised at this, but she’d evidently expected it: her hand slipped into her purse and drew out a ten-dollar bill. —That’s cool, she said. —I’m gonna do the baths anyway, if that’s okay?

  This is a tactic that Ronda figured out would work at some point: if she offered to pay to use the baths, I couldn’t really turn her away by being too busy with work. If you make yourself into a customer, you and your needs become unassailable. It is a horrible trick.

  I could see the sad setting in behind her eyes, like a spiny, stumbling millipede, something I was not confident in my ability to handle effectively. And she’d put her money away before I’d even told her I’d join her.

  The hot springs overlook the river. There are three sets of them, some encased in bath enclosures along the sand and scrub grass of the banks, some open to the sun. To get to the baths, you must walk out under the night sky and down the stone steps to the hidden natural basin among the scrub trees by the riverbank. You can soak by the rushing river, the blue mountain nights and their paint-spatter constellations; you can lean your elbows on the stone ledge scuffed smooth with years of other elbows, stare over the surface of the river as fog ferries out of the mountains and dream about something other than yourself and your problems. Or at least it would be nice, to do that.

  When I quit pretending to work and went to join Ronda, she was already in the tub, leaning out and looking at the river. Her bikini was mismatched: its top red and high gloss, its bottom a complicated construction of two layers, one transparent and one opaque, with some kind of fluid thinly trapped between them, along with little cutout fish shapes; when the suit squeezed, the fish swam. For the moment, the fish were still. I took my sandals off and slid my feet in with her.

  What’s up, I asked.

  Not much, she said. —Hanging. I’ve been sad, so I wanted to come over here. See the sun. It helps when I’m sad, you know?

  Girls grow in the sun, I said.

  She didn’t answer. I moved my feet against each other until all the sand had washed free from them and they were smoother than they’d been. In silence, half my mind worked to gauge just how sad Ronda was, the other half thought about how I had been a lousy friend to her. I hadn’t made an effort to see her; I had to make amends. The best way to make amends, I think, is to give someone the thing that you’d want to receive yourself.

  It’s really interesting about that song, I said. —You know it was recorded at the Summer Fun sessions, right? But the weird thing—and this becomes clear when you check out bootleg sessions from earlier Get Happies albums like Right Now, or even further back—is that the bass line is that same walking thing done throughout. And it’s tied to a lot of different songs with sun elements. So that bass line is kind of a sigil, right?

  Ronda was looking at me in a way that I knew meant I should stop talking. We sat there for a while, soaking in the springs, in silence.

  Is something wrong? I finally asked. —Do you want to like, talk about it?

  No, she said, after another moment; she said it letting out a sigh. —It just sucks being trans.

  It totally sucks being trans, I agreed.

  So we talked about this topic instead of about sigils; this topic is usually what we talked about. How do I even communicate to you what it’s like to have these conversations with this other trans woman? The encounter: a mundane setup, an interaction on the street, at a job, at a store. A statement, utterly insensitive, cruel, destructive. And then the eternal debate: did the person mean to do it? Did it happen because one or the other of us was trans, or just because we were deficient in some other way? Were we being too sensitive? Were we? It’s not that we’re being too sensit
ive? Aren’t we?

  I know what the right answer is when I’m speaking to Ronda: no, you’re not too sensitive. No, they meant to do it. No, it was totally because you were trans, and it’s totally fucked up that it happened that way. Again: you do for someone what you would want to have done for you. I want someone to do this for me: to tell me that no, everyone was really against you all along. If someone stands up for me, then I can continue to believe, without guilt, that I’m complicit after all. A friend does this for you.

  This is what she came to me, I guess, to get. The specific culprit this time was her sister-in-law, a specific argument they were having about Ronda’s half-brother, who has problems, and who lives in Ronda’s trailer with her. (I don’t even want to get into Ronda’s family stuff right now; trust me, you do not want to know.) Ronda’s sister-in-law misgendered Ronda not once, not twice, but thrice during a conversation about some specific assistance program that Ronda’s half-brother was or needed to be applying for. Being misgendered is par for the course; what we were trying to tease out today was some kind of correlation as to when Ronda was being misgendered, specifically: like did it happen more often when Ronda’s sister-in-law was upset with her and her reluctance to include her legal name rather than just the initial R on key government documents, or did it happen more often when her sister-in-law was relatively pleased with Ronda, telling Ronda’s brother a nice story about the last time they had gone shopping together, or about the foods they might eat at the forthcoming big family Thanksgiving? If you added up the absolute number of misused pronouns you got one interpretation; if you factored in more qualitative concerns, like tone of voice or whatever, you got another interpretation. This is what’s so fascinating about these conversations: there is a mystery to them! It’s sort of like talking about God, and as frustrating. But by trying to answer questions you can’t answer, you sort of construct a creed with one another, harrow it just a little deeper into your skin.